Op-Ed Guest Columnist: Machines of Laughter and Forgetting

UNTIL very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible," proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde.

Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: "Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

Wilde was not alone. "Civilization," wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, "advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." Whitehead was writing about mathematics, but technology, with its reliance on formula and algorithms, easily fits his dictum as well.

On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for "thinking" needs to happen only once, at the design stage. We'll surround ourselves with gadgets and artifacts that will do exactly what they are meant to do — and they'll do it in a frictionless, invisible way. "The ideal system so buries the technology that the user is not even aware of its presence," announced the design guru Donald Norman in his landmark 1998 book, "The Invisible Computer." But is that what we really want?

The hidden truth about many attempts to "bury" technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your "cognitive resources" so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on "contemplating" other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.

Whitehead, it seems, was either wrong or extremely selective: on many important issues, civilization only destroys itself by extending the number of important operations that we can perform without thinking about them. On many issues, we want more thinking, not less.

Take privacy. Opening browser tabs is easy, as is using our Facebook account to navigate from site to site. In fact, we often do so unthinkingly. Given that our online tools and platforms are built in a way to make our browsing experience as frictionless as possible, is it any surprise that so much of our personal information is disclosed without our ever realizing it?

This, too, is not inevitable: designed differently, our digital infrastructure could provide many more opportunities for reflection. In a recent paper, a group of Cornell researchers proposed that our browsers could bombard us with strange but provocative messages to make us alert to the very information infrastructure that some designers have done their best to conceal. Imagine being told that "you visited 592 Web sites this week. That's .5 times the number of Web pages on the whole Internet in 1994!"

The goal here is not to hit us with a piece of statistics — sheer numbers rarely lead to complex narratives — but to tell a story that can get us thinking about things we'd rather not be thinking about. So let us not give in to technophobia just yet: we should not go back to doing everything by hand just because it can lead to more thinking.

Rather, we must distribute the thinking process equally. Instead of having the designer think through all the moral and political implications of technology use before it reaches users — an impossible task — we must find a way to get users to do some of that thinking themselves.

Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don't have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas.

Recently, designers in Germany built devices — "transformational products," they call them — that engage users in "conversations without words." My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the "caterpillar" starts twisting as if it were in pain.

Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible.

While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an "aesthetic of friction" that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought — nay, contemplation — slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?

Evgeny Morozov, author of "To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism," is a guest columnist.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | The Stone: On Being Catholic

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

An old friend and mentor of mine, Ernan McMullin, was a philosopher of science widely respected in his discipline.  He was also a Catholic priest.  I don't know how many times fellow philosophers at professional meetings drew me aside and asked, "Does Ernan really believe that stuff?"  (He did.) Amid all the serious and generally respectful coverage of the papal resignation and the election of a new pope, I often detect an undertone of this same puzzlement.  Can reflective and honest intellectuals actually believe that stuff?

Here I sketch my reasons for answering "yes."  What I offer is neither apologetics aimed at converting others nor merely personal testimony.  Without claiming to speak for others, I try to articulate a position that I expect many fellow Catholics will find congenial and that non-Catholics (even those who reject all religion) may recognize as an intellectually respectable stance.  Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith.  I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason.

Toward the end of James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, rejects the Roman Catholic faith he was raised in.   A friend suggests that he might, then, become a Protestant.  Stephen replies, "I said that I had lost the faith . . . but not that I had lost self-respect." Factoring out the insult to Protestants, I would like to appropriate this Joycean mot to explain my own continuing attachment to the Catholic Church.

The Enlightenment and the Catholic Church? Yes, that needs some explaining.

I read "self-respect" as respect for what are (to borrow the title of the philosopher Charles Taylor's great book) the "sources of the self."  These are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual's life.  For me, there are two such sources.  One is the Enlightenment, where I'm particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic.  The other is the Catholic Church, in which I was baptized as an infant, raised by Catholic parents, and educated for 8 years of elementary school by Ursuline nuns and for 12 more years by Jesuits.  For me to deny either of these sources would be to deny something central to my moral being.

The Enlightenment and the Catholic Church?  Yes, that needs some explaining.  But first let me explain my attachment to Catholicism.  My Catholic education has left me with three deep convictions. First, it is utterly important to know, to the extent that we can, the fundamental truth about human life: where it came from, what (if anything) it is meant for, how it should be lived.  Second, this truth can in principle be supported and defended by human reason.  Third, the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought.  (The Jesuits I studied with were particularly strong on all three of these claims.)

Careful readers will note that these three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life.  What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition.  Here I distinguish three domains: metaphysical doctrines about the existence and nature of God, historical accounts from the Bible of how God has intervened in human history to reveal his truth and the ethics of love preached by Jesus.

The ethics of love I revere as the inspiration for so many (Catholics and others) who have led exemplary moral lives.  I don't say that this ethics is the only exemplary way to live or that we have anything near to an adequate understanding of it.  But I know that it has been a powerful force for good.  (Like so many Catholics, I do not see how the hierarchy's rigid strictures on sex and marriage could follow from the ethics of love.)  As to the theistic metaphysics, I'm agnostic about it taken literally, but see it as a superb intellectual construction that provides a fruitful context for understanding how our religious and moral experiences are tied to the ethics of love.  The historical stories, I maintain, are best taken as parables illustrating moral and metaphysical teachings.

Traditional apologetics has started with metaphysical arguments for God's existence, then argued from the action of God in the world to the truth of the Church's teachings as revealed by God and finally justified the ethics of love by appealing to these teachings.  I reverse this order, putting first the ethics of love as a teaching that directly captivates our moral sensibility, then taking the history and metaphysics as helpful elucidations of the ethics.

Of course, I can already hear the obvious objection: "What you believe isn't Catholicism — it is a diluted concoction that might satisfy ultra-liberal Protestants or Unitarians, but is nothing like the robust tonic of orthodox Catholic doctrine.  It's not surprising that so paltry a 'faith' doesn't conflict with the Enlightenment view of religion."  My answer is that Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

First, the Church now explicitly acknowledges the right of an individual's conscience in religious matters: No one may "be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters"  ("Catechism of the Catholic Church," citing a decree from the Second Vatican Council).   The official view still maintains that a conscience that rejects the hierarchy's formal teaching is objectively in error.  But it acknowledges that subjectively individuals not only may but should act on their sincere beliefs.

Second, the Church, in practice, hardly ever excludes from its community those who identity themselves as Catholics but reinterpret central teachings (and perhaps reject less central ones).  The "faithful" who attend Mass, receive the sacraments, send their children to Catholic schools and sometimes even teach theology include many who hold views similar to mine.   Church leaders have in effect agreed that the right to follow one's conscience includes the right of dissident Catholics to remain members of the Church.  They implicitly recognize the absurdity of the claim that a dissident who has been raised and educated in the Catholic Church and has maintained, with the Church's implicit consent, a lifetime involvement in its life is not "really" a Catholic.

Those who think of themselves as the conservative "core" of the Church maintain that the faith of such "liberal" Catholics is nonetheless seriously defective because it deviates significantly from the hierarchy's authoritative views.  But liberal Catholics like Hans Küng argue that the conservative view itself is defective.  Conservatives appeal to the authority of the hierarchy to justify their position, but this appeal is circular, since the nature of hierarchical authority is part of what liberals contest.  And Küng and other liberals plausibly argue that the early Church's structure was closer to the more democratic arrangements they favor than to the monarchist model of the Middle Ages.

The reasonable description of this situation is that there is deep disagreement within the Church about how its core doctrines, including those about the hierarchy's authority, should be understood.  With the Second Vatican Council, the hierarchy began a move toward the liberal position, which the successors of John XXIII have tried to reverse.  But history shows that Catholics play in a very long game, and there is no reason to give up hope for a new blossoming of the liberal buds.

Critics outside the Church will ask how I adhere to an institution that has so many deep flaws.  My first response is that the Catholic tradition of thought and practice is the only stance toward religion that, in William James's phrase, is a "live option" for me — the only place I feel at home.  Simply to renounce it would be, as I said at the outset, to lose my self-respect — to deny part of my moral core.

My second response is that the liberal drive for reform is the best hope of saving the Church.  Its greatest present danger is precisely the loss of the members whom the hierarchy and the rest of the conservative core want to marginalize.  I'm not willing to abandon the Church to them.

---

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author, most recently, of "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960," and writes regularly for The Stone. He was recently interviewed in 3am magazine.

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinionator | Draft: Those Irritating Verbs-as-Nouns

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

"Do you have a solve for this problem?" "Let's all focus on the build." "That's the take-away from today's seminar." Or, to quote a song that was recently a No. 1 hit in Britain, "Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?"

If you find these sentences annoying, you are not alone. Each contains an example of nominalization: a word we are used to encountering as a verb or adjective that has been transmuted into a noun. Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns, and associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly.

There are two types of nominalization. Type A involves a morphological change, namely suffixation: the verb "to investigate" produces the noun "investigation," and "to nominalize" yields "nominalization."

Type B is known as "zero derivation" — or, more straightforwardly, "conversion." This is what has taken place in my opening illustrations: a word has been switched from verb into noun (or, in the last two cases, from adjective into noun), without the addition of a suffix.

Plenty of teachers discourage heavy use of the first type of nominalization. Students are urged to turn nouns of this kind back into verbs, as if undoing a conjurer's temporary hoax. On this principle, "The violence was Ted's retaliation for years of abuse" is better rendered as "Ted retaliated violently after years of abuse."

The argument for doing this is that the first version is weaker: dynamic writing makes use of "stronger" verbs. Yet in practice there are times when we may want to phrase a matter in a way that is not so dynamic. Perhaps we feel the need to be tactful or cautious, to avoid emotiveness or the most naked kind of assertion. Type A nominalization can afford us flexibility as we try to structure what we say. It can also help us accentuate the main point we want to get across. Sure, it can be clunky, but sometimes it can be trenchant.

On the whole, it is Type B nominalization that really grates. "How can anybody use 'sequester' as a noun?" asks a friend. "The word is 'sequestration,' and if you say anything else you should be defenestrated."

"I'll look forward to the defenestrate," I say, and he calls me something I'd sooner not repeat.

Even in the face of such opprobrium, people continue to redeploy verbs as nouns. I am less interested in demonizing this than in thinking about the psychology behind what they are doing.

Why say "solve" rather than "solution"? One answer is that it gives an impression of freshness, by avoiding an everyday word. To some, "I have a solve" will sound jauntier and more pragmatic than "I have a solution." It's also more concise and less obviously Latinate (though the root of "solve" is the Latin solvere).

These aren't necessarily virtues, but they can be. If I speak of "the magician's reveal" rather than of "the magician's moment of revelation," I am evoking the thrill of this sudden unveiling or disclosure. The more traditional version is less immediate.

Using a Type B nominalization may also seem humorous and vivid. Thus, compare "that was an epic fail" (Type B nominalization), "that was an epic failure" (Type A nominalization) and "they failed to an epic degree" (neither).

There are other reasons for favoring nominalizations. They can have a distancing effect. "What is the ask?" is less personal than "What are they asking?" This form of words may improve our chances of eliciting a more objective response. It can also turn something amorphous into a discrete conceptual unit, of a kind that is easier to grasp or sounds more specific. Whatever I think of "what is the ask?" it focuses me on what's at stake.

Some regard unwieldy nominalizations as alarming evidence of the depraved zeitgeist. But the phenomenon itself is hardly new. For instance, "solve" as a noun is found in the 18th century, and the noun "fail" is older than "failure" (which effectively supplanted it).

"Reveal" has been used as a noun since the 16th century. Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s.

"Ask" has been used as a noun for a thousand years — though the way we most often encounter it today, with a modifier ("a big ask"), is a 1980s development.

It is easy to decry nominalization. I don't feel that a writer is doing me any favors when he expresses himself thus: "The successful implementation of the scheme was a validation of the exertions involved in its conception." There are crisper ways to say this. And yes, while we're about it, I don't actually care for "Do you have a solve?"

Still, it is simplistic to have a blanket policy of avoiding and condemning nominalizations. Even when critics couch their antipathy in a language of clinical reasonableness, they are expressing an aesthetic judgment.

Aesthetics will always play a part in the decisions we make about how to express ourselves — and in our assessment of other people's expression — but sometimes we need to do things that are aesthetically unpleasant in order to achieve other effects, be they polemical or diplomatic.

---

Henry Hitchings is the author of three books exploring language and history, including, most recently, "The Language Wars."

13.26 | 0 komentar | Read More

Opinion: Sundown in America

GREENWICH, Conn.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market's last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation's bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today's feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we've had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones ("clean" energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating "demand," even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you'd never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.

Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.

David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan's budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America."

13.26 | 1 komentar | Read More

Sundown in America

GREENWICH, Conn.

The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor's 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market's last peak, in 2007. But instead of cheering, we should be very afraid.

Over the last 13 years, the stock market has twice crashed and touched off a recession: American households lost $5 trillion in the 2000 dot-com bust and more than $7 trillion in the 2007 housing crash. Sooner or later — within a few years, I predict — this latest Wall Street bubble, inflated by an egregious flood of phony money from the Federal Reserve rather than real economic gains, will explode, too.

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation's bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today's feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we've had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones ("clean" energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating "demand," even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you'd never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.

Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.

David A. Stockman is a former Republican congressman from Michigan, President Ronald Reagan's budget director from 1981 to 1985 and the author, most recently, of "The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America."

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: Strengthening the I.M.F.

Let's face it: the International Monetary Fund is not widely loved. It has forced countries in financial distress to adopt counterproductive austerity policies, and it failed to anticipate the financial crisis. But in recent years the I.M.F. has helped stabilize the global economy, most recently by providing loans to troubled European countries like Greece and Ireland. That is why Congress needs to strengthen its governance and bolster its resources by ratifying reforms to the organization that were agreed to in 2010 by its 188 member countries.

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The changes, which were primarily devised by the Obama administration, would double, to about $755 billion, the fund's capital, which has fallen sharply as a percentage of the global economy in the last decade. Another measure would give developing countries a bigger say in the fund's management, to reflect their recent growth. The reforms would do all this without increasing America's financial commitment to the organization and while preserving Washington's power to veto any big changes to how it operates.

Most of the world's countries have endorsed the changes, as have dozens of economists and former American officials representing both parties. But Congress, which must pass legislation before the measures can be implemented, has not even considered them. The administration is partly to blame. It did not send the proposals to Congress until this month, when it asked that they be included in the continuing resolution meant to forestall a government shutdown. Senate Democrats did not include them because they feared that House Republicans would use the proposed reforms to hold up the entire bill. Some Republicans distrust international organizations in general, and some believe that the I.M.F. does not need more money.

The reality is that the I.M.F. is the world's primary defense against global financial disasters. Increasing the fund's resources will ensure that it can respond quickly to another wave of turmoil in Europe or elsewhere that would inevitably hurt the American economy. Enacting these reforms is also important because doing so will signal to developing countries like Brazil and India that the United States wants them to play a bigger role on the global stage. That has been a priority for Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

These changes are in America's interest. The administration needs to make a strong public case for why they are important, and Republican lawmakers need to look beyond their aversion to international entanglements and vote for them.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial: A Prescription for Sick Workers

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has finally agreed to require businesses to provide paid sick leave for as many as one million workers. This is good news, although it will take at least a year for most employees to enjoy a basic benefit widely available elsewhere.

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The bill that Ms. Quinn has endorsed, and that is now moving to the City Council for approval, contains a trigger inserted at her insistence that can delay the sick leave requirement if the city's economy erodes. The bill uses a financial index from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to determine if the economy is strong enough for covered businesses to give employees paid sick leave. Proponents of her compromise suggest that only a deep recession would actually spark a delay in implementing the new law.

If the New York economy continues at its present level, companies with 20 or more workers will be required as of April 1, 2014, to provide at least five paid sick leave days a year. Eventually, the law would cover all companies with at least 15 employees and make it illegal to fire any worker who takes up to five sick days, paid or unpaid.

Ms. Quinn, a candidate for mayor, had blocked serious discussion on this issue for too long. She says she had simply been trying to balance the needs of employees with protections for small businesses. Now she promises to fight to make this benefit work. One key change for the better is that the new bill drops extra paperwork, inspections and steep fines that troubled many business owners.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already sent word that he will veto the compromise as a "shortsighted" measure that will make the city less competitive for businesses. It is his view that is now shortsighted; even city business interests have agreed that they can live with this measure. Fortunately, there are enough supporters in the City Council to override the mayor's veto.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Editorial Observer: Platitudes Loom After the Newtown School Carnage

The sparse turnout outside City Hall had to be discouraging Thursday for a phalanx of government leaders intent on bringing public pressure to bear on the nation's wavering lawmakers to enact gun controls. "The overwhelming majority of Americans have been on our side," noted Senator Richard Blumenthal, who had to concede, "but they have been the silent majority."

He underlined the central question: Are the strong public opinion poll numbers for gun controls, which registered at 90 percent immediately after the December school massacre in nearby Newtown, already fading in the bewildering maw of gun politics on Capitol Hill?

Here on Main Street, the art of suffocating needed reform by Congress felt palpable. The proposed ban on the sort of assault rifle used in Newtown is sagely pronounced a political nonstarter even before the Senate votes. Hope fades for a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines. And the call for universal background checks for gun ownership is increasingly in doubt as Senate Republicans, sensing dwindling interest, resort to usual vows to filibuster.

The gathering here of a few score of people was one of more than 100 rallies organized by the Obama administration and mayors as part of a national grass-roots campaign. Hopeful speeches were delivered, but it seemed clear that a far more fully aroused public will be required to budge enough lawmakers from their obeisance to the gun lobby. Gov. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut made no secret of his frustration with the pace of nonaction, both in the Statehouse across town and in Congress. He denounced the "silliness" of a drawn-out police investigation that has kept basic information about the tragedy secret for three months — information the public and lawmakers need to know in driving for a solution.

This is no minor point. Some grisly details were recently leaked at a police convention about the rapid-fire execution of the 20 Newtown children and six school personnel. Yet victimized parents and legislators were kept in the dark as the gun control debate lost traction. Though a few censored details emerged Thursday, a fuller understanding of the truth of gun violence is critical, particularly in grasping the outsized firepower of the purported "sportsman's" weapon, the military-style Bushmaster XM-15-E2S assault rifle that destroyed the Newtown victims in a spray of 154 rounds. "The more we know, the more compelling argument at the national level," Mr. Blumenthal said.

In Washington, President Obama sounded no less frustrated than Mr. Malloy. "Shame on us if we've forgotten," Mr. Obama told an audience at the White House in reviewing the worrisome arc of the gun control debate as it moves further in time from the Newtown massacre. "I haven't forgotten those kids," he said. "We need everybody to remember how we felt 100 days ago and make sure that what we said at that time wasn't just a bunch of platitudes."

Platitudes bunch like flowers across the nation's history of trying to achieve effective gun controls. After the Columbine school massacre, a Mother's Day march in 2000 on the National Mall drew hundreds of thousands of citizens demanding action. It was an impressive sight that participants thought could surely not be ignored by Congress. Its agenda also included the same proposal for universal background checks for gun ownership that is being sought, nearly 13 years later, as the only responsible way to mark the Newtown tragedy.

13.25 | 0 komentar | Read More

Op-Ed Columnist: The Republicans’ Diversity Deserts

Well, that didn't take long.

Just a week ago, the Republicans issued their much-ballyhooed "autopsy" on why they lost the presidential election last year and how they might remedy their problems.

They concluded that their principles were fine; the problem was how they presented those principles. Their witless wisdom is simply to tone down their rhetoric. They want to turn Teddy Roosevelt's famous saying on its side: Talk softly but carry a big stigma.

The establishment Republicans' push for a softer tone, however, is pure political scheming and has nothing to do with what most Republicans seem to fundamentally believe.

And many rank-and-file Republicans are adopting this two-faced tactic. A Pew Research Center report issued Thursday found that although most Republicans say that "illegal immigrants" should be allowed to stay in this country legally, most also believe that immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and health care, and they threaten American values.

Try as you may, you can't build a philosophical facade like a movie set — convincing in appearance, but having no real structure behind it — and expect it to forever fool and never fall.

The true convictions of your heart will, eventually, be betrayed by the disobedience of your tongue.

Enter Don Young of Alaska, a Republican congressman for the past 40 years who this week used a racial slur so vile and insensitive that it was hard to remember what decade we were in.

In an interview Thursday with an Alaska radio station, Young reminisced about his family's employment of Mexican farm workers:

"My father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes. You know, it takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It's all done by machine."

The casual reference dripped with an inculcated insensitivity.

The same day, Young's office issued a statement, which should in no way be misconstrued as an apology.

"During a sit-down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California," Young said in the statement. "I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect."

No disrespect? Only a man drained of empathy could even make such a claim.

It wasn't until Friday, after demands from Republican leaders like John Boehner and John McCain, that Young issued a real apology. But the damage may have already been done. These kinds of statements cement an image of a callous party moving contrary to public consciousness.

The question must be asked: Why do so many insensitive comments come from these Republicans?

One reason may well be their proximity problem.

Too many House Republican districts are isolated in naturally homogeneous areas or gerrymandered ghettos, so elected officials there rarely hear — or see — the great and growing diversity of this country and the infusion of energy and ideas and art with which it enriches us. These districts produce representatives unaccountable to the confluence. And this will likely be the case for the next decade.

For instance, according to the Census Bureau, about 6 percent of Alaska's population is Hispanic and just 3 percent is black. And Alaska is among the most Republican states in the union, according to a Gallup report issued last year.

Too many House Republicans have districts dominated by narrow, single-note, ideology-driven constituencies that see an ever expanding "them" threatening the heritage of a slowly shrinking "us."

This defensive posture is what so poisons the Republicans' presidential ambitions. Instead of embracing change, Republicans want to suspend or in some cases reverse it. But the principle articulated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus rings true: the only thing constant is change.

With the exception of a few districts, a map of the areas in this country with the fewest minorities looks strikingly similar to a map of the areas from which Congressional Republicans hail.

In fact, although this is the most diverse Congress in history, not one of the blacks or Asians in the House is a Republican. Only about a sixth of the Hispanics are Republicans, and fewer than a third of the women are.

The Republican Party has a severe minority problem. People like Don Young only serve to illustrate and amplify it. Young is another unfortunate poster child for a party fighting an image of being chronically hostile to "otherness." No disrespect.

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Opinionator: Tonight, Tonight, Its World Is Full of Blight

Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.

Tags:

Colbert, Stephen, Griffin, Merv, Letterman, Dave, National Broadcasting Co, Paar, Jack, Television, The Tonight Show (TV Program)

Once again, "The Tonight Show" rears its hoary head in the headlines. (Unintentional word-play.)

The dear old thing, the brainchild of the great Pat Weaver (Sigourney's pop), has endured as if it were a World War II veteran surviving health crisis after health crisis over the years, defying demise.

For me, addicted watching began with Jack Paar. When Jack departed the show for good in 1962 — having left it temporarily once already — it was predicted that "Tonight" would die on the vine. Who could replace that sentimental, explosive, compellingly neurotic master of late-night? And where would you even begin to look for such a one?

The answer came. The boyishly nice-looking guy from Nebraska, collegiate and witty, who killed 'em out of the public eye at Friars' roasts and trade lunches while hosting the ungrammatically named game show "Who Do You Trust?" (TV's earliest dumbing down?)

The powers could breathe easily. The "Tonight" cash cow, without Jack, would not one day be found dead in the pasture.

And now, for a little-remembered fact: It didn't go well for Johnny Carson at first. Hard to believe about his smashing 30-year endurance record at that desk.

Let me take you back. A now-forgotten summer passed between Jack's exit and Johnny's debut. There were contract matters, but Johnny also well knew it would have been unwise, with Jack's departing good-bye wave still fresh in bereft viewers' minds, to pop brightly onto his predecessor's stage as the clean-cut but resented new boy.

And there was another factor. It was called Merv Griffin.

A virtual mob of substitute hosts that summer — and oh, did I write for them — included not only Merv but various comics, movie stars, Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl, Art Linkletter (let's keep moving), Donald O'Connor (!), Jerry Lewis, a Gabor, and on and on, all trying their variously talented hands at what Jack made look easy.

Merv did two weeks sensationally. Johnny spent a goodly amount of awkward, between-jobs time that summer in his high-rise apartment over the East River with his drums, his telescope and his compulsive reading, practicing his card sleights and then having to endure a gradually rising tide of articles and column items about how Merv should have been the one to get "The Tonight Show."

I could never figure out why there seemed to be an almost organized campaign to take the show back from Johnny before he ever got it. Merv, not above, shall we say, dedicated self-interest, was to my mind probably quietly instrumental in much of this. But then who, in our business, never known for being full of selfless sweethearts, would not fight at least tooth, if not nail, for the Big Prize?

If you were around then and aware, I'll bet you've suppressed, repressed or forgotten that Merv, while not getting the show, did get his own duplicate of "Tonight" on NBC daytime. The two shows made their debuts at the same time. Merv got the good reviews.

(Being a brash lad, I summoned the testicularity at the time to ask Johnny his thoughts on Merv as chat-show host. Came the reply, "A case of the bland leading the bland.")

In the words of the TV scribes, Johnny was "stiff," "awkward," "uncomfortable" and even "phony." Merv, on the contrary, was hailed with a list of "up" adjectives: "bright," "clever," "sharp," "sincere" and "a good listener."

I insert a namedrop here: I was startled to hear the astute "Fat Jack" Leonard say, backstage at a benefit, "I'm sorry, but that Carson guy ain't makin' it."

He wasn't all wrong. Johnny took a slow slide into the job before hitting his stride. And, at first, it was painful to watch, and agony for him. Who would believe this now, familiar with only his later years?

Pundits agreed, NBC had made a mistake.

Hard as the fact is to digest in light of Johnny's decades on that throne, insiders assured us it was, as one columnist put it, just a matter of time for Mr. Carson.

And of course, how right that was.

It was a mere three decades.

I've been asked for comments by various columnists and publications these days, what with the T. Show back in the news with the Leno-Fallon-Kimmel eruption. NBC must have a bushel-size bottle of Bayer product in their infirmary labeled "Recurrent 'Tonight Show' Headaches." There's probably enough material for a series in the various "Tonight" traumas over the years, with episodes titled, "Jack Walks"; "Jack Returns"; "Johnny Arrives"; "Johnny Struggles, Then Triumphs"; "Jay Soars"; "Jay Demoted"; "Conan at Bat"; "Bye-Bye, Conan"; "Jay Redux"; "Kimmel Threatens"; "Fallon on the Rise"; "Jay Re-Threatened" and so on, into the late night.

Ironically, all this takes place at a time when there are articles, including one in 2010 in The New Yorker, about how late-night talk is doomed to be a fading commodity.

I've been widely asked about the reported building of a new set for our East Coast Jimmy — whether I'm among those who think "Tonight" belongs in Manhattan. Yes. And it always did.

James Barron quoted me last week in this paper as saying that for me the show was always "a lifeline to New York." When home in Nebraska on visits during college, it was my fix.

(I, too, shared the lifeline honor. More than once I'd hear from an actor tired of the exhausting town-to-town trouping: After our show, on the road, we'd go back to the hotel room in Detroit or Omaha or Klamath Falls, pour a drink and say, "Switch on Cavett, quick, for some New York oxygen.")

Jack started it and all of us took our shows to L.A. from time to time for a fortnight. I can't say why, exactly, but "Tonight" just means Gotham, in the same way that Grand Central would just look wrong somehow in Burbank.

Bit of a scoop? Once when I was on with Johnny out there after his coast move, in a moment of confidential frankness during a commercial, he whispered, "Richard, I'm not convinced yet that this was one of my genius ideas."

Another time, when I was a guest with Johnny not long after he'd started his cut-down-to-an-hour shows, he told me backstage that he'd convinced himself that the cutting back would seem easier and shorter. And that, to his surprise, it didn't.

When growing up out there in the West, both Johnny and I (at separate times) dreamed the traditional dream of the bright lights of Broadway and the glamour of Manhattan. New York, New York was our craved Shangri-La. Not the La Brea Tar Pits.

If my friend Dave Letterman should decide next contract time that he's sat through one too many starlet guests who come on to plug their movies, exhibit seemingly a yard of bare gam, pepper their speech with "likes" and "I'm like" and "awesome" and "oh, wow" and "amazing," and list at least seven things they are "excited" about despite the evidence, from who knows what cause, of their half-mast eyelids, I'll regret his going.

And speaking of Dave's presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I'm thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don't mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who's met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his "role" on "The Colbert Report." Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I'll bet you he could name the author of "Peregrine Pickle." And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won't take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don't blow it, CBS.

Mercy. I just checked my word count. It seems I'm getting a dose of memory-triggering about working for Carson, Jack and Merv. But right now we both need a rest. I'll save, until you have me back, how my big mouth nearly blew me out of my cherished job with Jack.

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Editorial: Wealth That Comes of Tragedy in Newtown, Conn.

No one should envy the civic leaders of Newtown, Conn., as they attempt to bring order and transparency to distributing most of the $15 million in donations that has poured into town since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 20 children and six adults last December. The money was given through 40 ad hoc groups, many of them pursuing separate causes from helping families to building a local memorial, even an angel atop the town flagpole.

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Town officials have wisely been listening to warnings from veterans of earlier tragedies — including the Columbine, Aurora and Virginia Tech shootings and the Sept. 11 atrocities — that there will be no easy way to please everyone. "They all said, 'You need thick-skinned people, because this will be a thankless job,' " Newtown's second selectman, William Rodgers, told The Times's Peter Applebome. Mr. Rodgers is also director of the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation that was created to disburse more than $10 million.

The task is one of the post-mortem burdens of communities raked by violence and death tolls that stir an outpouring of charity from a shocked nation. It has become such a repeated American phenomenon that a group of families and survivors of earlier mass tragedies is proposing creation of a National Compassion Fund.

The goal is to assure that money is distributed under a transparent protocol focused on wounded families, so that money is not diverted to extraneous causes. In the past, the heartbreak of lives lost has been compounded by public quarreling over donations. Outside adjudicators have been asked to play Solomon in such complex issues as the price of stress disorders stretching across years.

The Newtown foundation aims to emphasize local input and the advice of a distribution committee dedicated to public disclosure. Mr. Rodgers promises a "measured and incremental" approach. But he's been warned that the fight to return to normalcy is "never over," in the words of Frank DeAngelis, still the Columbine High School principal 14 years after that shooting massacre. "Newtown and Sandy Hook will have to redefine what normal is."

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Editorial: Terror in Tahrir Square

Cairo's Tahrir Square once symbolized the hope Egyptians felt when they overthrew Hosni Mubarak and began building a democracy. But this iconic rallying point for protesters has today also come to symbolize the terror and contempt women increasingly face since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power and the country descended into turmoil.

Assaults and gang rapes of women in Tahrir have become so common the last two years that the square is now a no-go zone for women, especially after dark. There are no official statistics. But according to an account in The Times on Tuesday, at least 18 incidents were reported on Jan. 25, the second anniversary of the revolution, during a demonstration against the new Islamist-led government.

Six women were hospitalized, one was stabbed in the genitals and another required a hysterectomy. Hania Moheeb, 42, a journalist, told how a group of men had surrounded her in Tahrir, stripped off her clothes and violated her for almost an hour.

The scandal is not just that such violence happens. The women are being blamed by conservative Islamists for bringing the assaults on themselves. As Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general and lawmaker, said, "Sometimes, a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions."

Such twisted thinking is not only hateful in itself but is designed to keep women, who were at the front lines of the revolution, out of politics and power. If President Mohamed Morsi, his Islamist-led government and opposition political leaders do not speak out unambiguously and repeatedly to condemn the attacks and also bring assailants to justice, they are complicit in the crimes.

In the Mubarak era, the omnipresent police kept sexual violence out of prominent public sites and public view. Since the police withdrew from Tahrir Square and other places, sexual assaults have grown bolder and more violent. Attackers are also enabled by certain extreme religious orthodoxies and government policy. This month, when a United Nations conference adopted guidelines for ending violence against women, the Brotherhood condemned the statement, saying it would undermine Islamic ethics and lead to the disintegration of society.

Because Egypt is a leader in the Arab world, what it does and says about women and their relationship to Islam matters a lot. The Brotherhood says it is committed to the rule of law and equal rights, but unless those concepts are applied in ways that let women live their lives safely and as true partners and citizens alongside men, they are just slogans and a surefire guarantee of persistent hostility and controversy in a country that can ill afford either.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Cheating Our Children

So, about that fiscal crisis — the one that would, any day now, turn us into Greece. Greece, I tell you: Never mind.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a remarkable change of position among the deficit scolds who have dominated economic policy debate for more than three years. It's as if someone sent out a memo saying that the Chicken Little act, with its repeated warnings of a U.S. debt crisis that keeps not happening, has outlived its usefulness. Suddenly, the argument has changed: It's not about the crisis next month; it's about the long run, about not cheating our children. The deficit, we're told, is really a moral issue.

There's just one problem: The new argument is as bad as the old one. Yes, we are cheating our children, but the deficit has nothing to do with it.

Before I get there, a few words about the sudden switch in arguments.

There has, of course, been no explicit announcement of a change in position. But the signs are everywhere. Pundits who spent years trying to foster a sense of panic over the deficit have begun writing pieces lamenting the likelihood that there won't be a crisis, after all. Maybe it wasn't that significant when President Obama declared that we don't face any "immediate" debt crisis, but it did represent a change in tone from his previous deficit-hawk rhetoric. And it was startling, indeed, when John Boehner, the speaker of the House, said exactly the same thing a few days later.

What happened? Basically, the numbers refuse to cooperate: Interest rates remain stubbornly low, deficits are declining and even 10-year budget projections basically show a stable fiscal outlook rather than exploding debt.

So talk of a fiscal crisis has subsided. Yet the deficit scolds haven't given up on their determination to bully the nation into slashing Social Security and Medicare. So they have a new line: We must bring down the deficit right away because it's "generational warfare," imposing a crippling burden on the next generation.

What's wrong with this argument? For one thing, it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of what debt does to the economy.

Contrary to almost everything you read in the papers or see on TV, debt doesn't directly make our nation poorer; it's essentially money we owe to ourselves. Deficits would indirectly be making us poorer if they were either leading to big trade deficits, increasing our overseas borrowing, or crowding out investment, reducing future productive capacity. But they aren't: Trade deficits are down, not up, while business investment has actually recovered fairly strongly from the slump. And the main reason businesses aren't investing more is inadequate demand. They're sitting on lots of cash, despite soaring profits, because there's no reason to expand capacity when you aren't selling enough to use the capacity you have. In fact, you can think of deficits mainly as a way to put some of that idle cash to use.

Yet there is, as I said, a lot of truth to the charge that we're cheating our children. How? By neglecting public investment and failing to provide jobs.

You don't have to be a civil engineer to realize that America needs more and better infrastructure, but the latest "report card" from the American Society of Civil Engineers — with its tally of deficient dams, bridges, and more, and its overall grade of D+ — still makes startling and depressing reading. And right now — with vast numbers of unemployed construction workers and vast amounts of cash sitting idle — would be a great time to rebuild our infrastructure. Yet public investment has actually plunged since the slump began.

Or what about investing in our young? We're cutting back there, too, having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families.

Last but not least, think of the waste of human potential caused by high unemployment among younger Americans — for example, among recent college graduates who can't start their careers and will probably never make up the lost ground.

And why are we shortchanging the future so dramatically and inexcusably? Blame the deficit scolds, who weep crocodile tears over the supposed burden of debt on the next generation, but whose constant inveighing against the risks of government borrowing, by undercutting political support for public investment and job creation, has done far more to cheat our children than deficits ever did.

Fiscal policy is, indeed, a moral issue, and we should be ashamed of what we're doing to the next generation's economic prospects. But our sin involves investing too little, not borrowing too much — and the deficit scolds, for all their claims to have our children's interests at heart, are actually the bad guys in this story.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Empirical Kids

Twelve years ago, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, called "The Organization Kid," about the smart, hard-working, pleasant-but-cautious achievatrons who thrive in elite universities. Occasionally, somebody asks me how students have changed since then. I haven't been perceptive enough to give a good answer.

But, this year, I'm teaching at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, and one terrifically observant senior, Victoria Buhler, wrote a paper trying to capture how it feels to be in at least a segment of her age cohort. She's given me permission to quote from it.

Buhler points out that the college students of 12 years ago grew up with 1990s prosperity at home, and the democratic triumph in the cold war abroad. They naturally had a tendency to believe deeply "in the American model of democratic capitalism, which created all men equal but allowed some to rise above others through competition."

Then came Sept. 11. That was followed by the highly moralistic language of George W. Bush's war on terror: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil."

But Bush's effort to replicate the Reagan war on an evil empire lead to humiliation, not triumph. Americans, Buhler writes, "emerged from the experience both dismissive of foreign intervention as a tool of statecraft as well as wary of the moral language used to justify it."

Then came the financial crisis, the other formative event for today's students. The root of the crisis was in the financial world. But the pain was felt outside that world. "The capitalist system, with its promise of positive-sum gains for all, appeared brutal and unpredictable."

Moreover, today's students harbor the anxiety that in the race for global accomplishment, they may no longer be the best competitors. Chinese students spend 12-hour days in school, while American scores are middle of the pack.

In sum, today's graduates enter a harsher landscape. Immediate postgrad life, Buhler writes, will probably bear a depressing resemblance to Hannah Horvath's world on "Girls." The hit song "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis "is less a fashion statement, more a looming financial reality."

Buhler argues that the group she calls Cynic Kids "don't like the system — however, they are wary of other alternatives as well as dismissive of their ability to actually achieve the desired modifications. As such, the generation is very conservative in its appetite for change. Broadly speaking, Cynic Kids distrust the link between action and result."

A Brookings Institution survey found that only 10 percent of young people agree with the statement, "America should be more globally proactive." The Occupy movement, Buhler notes, "launched more traffic jams than legislation." The Arab Spring seemed like a popular awakening but has not fulfilled its promise.

In what I think is an especially trenchant observation, Buhler suggests that these disillusioning events have led to a different epistemological framework. "We are deeply resistant to idealism. Rather, the Cynic Kids have embraced the policy revolution; they require hypothesis to be tested, substantiated, and then results replicated before they commit to any course of action."

Maybe this empirical mind-set is a sign of maturity, but Buhler acknowledges that the "yearning for definitive 'evidence' ... can retard action. ... The multiplicity of options invites relativism as a response to the insurmountable complexity. Ever the policy buffs, we know we are unable to scientifically appraise different options, and so, given the information constraints, we stick with the evil we know."

She suggests calling this state of mind the Tinder Effect, referring to the app that lets you scroll through hundreds of potential romantic partners, but that rarely leads to a real-life encounter.

Buhler's most comprehensive disquiet is with the meritocratic system itself. It rewards an obsessive focus on individual improvement: "Time not spent investing in yourself carries an opportunity cost, rendering you at a competitive disadvantage as compared to others who maintained the priority of self."

She wonders if the educated class is beginning to look at the less-educated class — portrayed on TV in shows like "Teen Mom 2" and "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" — as a distant, dysfunctional spectacle. She also wonders if the mathematization of public policy performs a gatekeeper function; only the elite can understand the formulas that govern most people's lives.

I had many reactions to Buhler's dazzling paper, but I'd like to highlight one: that the harsh events of the past decade may have produced not a youth revolt but a reversion to an empiricist mind-set, a tendency to think in demoralized economic phrases like "data analysis," "opportunity costs" and "replicability," and a tendency to dismiss other more ethical and idealistic vocabularies that seem fuzzy and, therefore, unreliable. After the hippie, the yuppie and the hipster, the cool people are now wonksters.

And, yes, I gave her an A.

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Editorial: Malicious Obstruction in the Senate

Earlier this month, during one of his new across-the-aisle good-will tours, President Obama pleaded with Senate Republicans to ease up on their record number of filibusters of his nominees. He might as well have been talking to one of the statues in the Capitol. Republicans have made it clear that erecting hurdles for Mr. Obama is, if anything, their overriding legislative goal.

There is no historical precedent for the number of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation margins instead of simple majorities. Susan Rice surely would have been filibustered and thus was not nominated to be secretary of state.

Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, was barraged with 444 written questions, mostly from Republicans, more than the previous seven nominees for that position combined. Many were ridiculous and had nothing to do with Mr. Lew's fitness for office, such as a demand to explain the Treasury's social media policies, or questioning an infographic on the department's blog eight months ago.

Gina McCarthy, the nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, is being blocked by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri until he gets the answers he wants on a local levee project. And Thomas Perez, nominated to be labor secretary, is being held up by Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who is angry about the Justice Department's enforcement of voting rights laws. By comparison, there were four filibusters of cabinet-level positions during George W. Bush's two terms, and one under President Ronald Reagan.

There have also been several impediments to executive-branch nominees beneath the cabinet level, the most troubling being that of Richard Cordray, whom Mr. Obama has renominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Because the bureau cannot properly run without a full-time director, Republicans intend to nullify many of its powers by blocking Mr. Cordray for the second time.

Mr. Obama's judicial nominees are also waiting for exceptionally long periods to be confirmed. The average wait for circuit and district judges under Mr. Obama has been 227 days, compared with 175 days under Mr. Bush. Last week, the Senate confirmed Richard Taranto as an appellate judge 484 days after his first nomination. (Republicans refused to confirm him in an election year.) The next appellate judge to come up, Patty Shwartz, has been waiting a year for a vote.

Last week, Caitlin Halligan, another appeals court nominee, had to withdraw from consideration after Republicans filibustered her for the second time, on the flimsy pretext that she was a legal activist. Republicans clearly don't want any of Mr. Obama's judges on the important United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to which she was nominated, and the president needs to be more aggressive about filling the four vacancies on the court.

Republicans clearly have no interest in dropping their favorite pastime, but Democrats could put a stop to this malicious behavior by changing the Senate rules and prohibiting, at long last, all filibusters on nominations.

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Letters: As the Court Ponders Gay Marriage

Re "Justices Say Time May Be Wrong for Ruling on Gay Marriage" (front page, March 27):

For those of us who are gay, and who suffer discrimination and put up with second-class status on the issue of marriage every single day, there is no such thing as acting too quickly to secure our right to marriage equality. To think that the Supreme Court would refrain from doing the right thing simply out of concern for what others will think or fear is unconscionable to those of us who want nothing more than to be treated equally under the law.

My message to the court: If justice is truly blind, prove it.

HYAM KRAMER
Jamaica Plain, Mass., March 27, 2013

To the Editor:

Justices who fear that a decision in favor of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry would get too far out in front of society's current mind-set would do well to remember that the Supreme Court moved to address a similar fear in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Isn't that how we got the infamous phrase "with all deliberate speed," which permitted school districts to prolong the injustice of unequal education for many years?

The justices need to enforce our constitutional rights regardless of the longstanding prejudices of those who oppose them.

TONI OLIVIERO

Jackson Heights, Queens

March 27, 2013

To the Editor:

In the oral arguments concerning California's ban on same-gender marriage, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia cited considerable disagreement and a lack of data regarding the issue of whether harm is done to a child adopted by a same-gender couple. These comments are seemingly in contrast to the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement released last week in favor of same-gender marriage.

The policy statement came about as a result of more than 30 years of research showing no causal relationship between parents' sexual orientation and their children's well-being, making the child-welfare-centered arguments against same-gender marriage seem at best uninformed and at worst disingenuous. Allowing same-gender couples to marry, according to the pediatrics' academy, will promote children's physical, social and mental health.

CHRIS KIM
Atlanta, March 27, 2013

The writer is a student at the Emory University School of Medicine.

To the Editor:

As a lawyer who concentrated in constitutional law in law school, I favor full and equal rights for gay couples, but this legally recognized relationship cannot be called "marriage" without hijacking and destroying the meaning of that term.

However deeply two men or two women love each other, whatever they do behind closed doors, they cannot be engaged in "matrimony," as that word has been used since the 13th century.

Gender identification is basic to marriage. "Gay marriage" cannot be "marriage" because it is not the union of a "husband" and a "wife."

JOSEPH TARANTINO
Northampton, Mass., March 27, 2013

To the Editor:

Opposition to gay marriage rights is rooted in a scriptural definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Isn't this an intrusion of religious values into state functions and a violation of separation of church and state?

The state should issue and recognize only civil unions between legally consenting adults, governing legal issues such as property ownership or power of attorney. A "marriage" should be conducted by a person's spiritual leader for that person and his or her partner of choice. The government has no business defining a marriage.

BILL CONROD
Grand Junction, Colo., March 27, 2013

To the Editor:

As the child of two mothers, I read David Cole's March 26 Op-Ed article, "Deciding Not to Decide Gay Marriage," with great chagrin. If history has taught us anything, it is that action is the sine qua non of change. Mr. Cole, however, advocates inaction because "in the long run, national recognition of same-sex marriage is inevitable." Surely the end of slavery was inevitable, but we fought a war; the end of segregation was inevitable, but needed to be carried out by the National Guard.

The purpose of Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education was not to convince society of the rightness of abortion or racial equality, but to enact, in law, the protection of our rights to freedom and equality. To advocate inaction, to let same-sex marriage "propagate organically," is to condone inequality indefinitely. That is certainly not the moral choice.

GERRIT LANSING
Somerville, Mass., March 26, 2013

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Letter: Benefits for Drug Felons

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Sadly, some states continue to deny social welfare benefits to impoverished citizens with drug felony convictions ("Unfair Punishments," editorial, March 17). But a majority of states restore such benefits to drug felons, including food stamps.

This is a welcome surprise. Their actions give us hope that the "punitive turn" penologists observed the United States make over the last four decades is reversible. I recently conducted a peer-reviewed study on the trend.

As for states that continue to follow the federal government's preference for banning aid to drug felons — but not to poor rapists, robbers and murderers — they tend to cling to correctional cultures of retribution and degradation.

They also tend to treat all felons badly after their convictions, diminishing the rights and benefits of citizenship in other areas (voting and licensing).

Exploding correctional costs and the connection between bad policies and criminal behavior, however, will likely reverse their courses, too.

MICHAEL LEO OWENS
Atlanta, March 20, 2013

The writer is an associate professor of political science at Emory University.

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Letter: Sorry State of the Airports

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"Small Gains Are Observed by Engineers in Report" (news article, March 19), while doing a great job of highlighting the poor showing of a variety of United States infrastructure aspects, doesn't mention the pitiable D grade given to our aviation infrastructure. That New York's three major airports, for example, are ranked among the world's worst has real economic implications.

As commercial hubs, these airports have inefficiencies that have a ripple effect throughout the country, and their sorry state deters visitors from using them as gateways to our travel destinations. The world is in the midst of a global travel boom led by the expanding middle classes of China, Brazil and India. Unless we act now to overhaul our aging infrastructure, we will lose these travelers along with the windfall of jobs and tax revenues they provide.

Fortunately, the government doesn't have to pay the full tab. Private capital is ready to be invested through public-private partnerships that will create greater accountability and transparency, introduce innovation and competition, and help ensure on-time and on-budget completion, saving taxpayer dollars.

Infrastructure is a subject we can't afford to fail in. We also shouldn't settle for a D. We can do better.

JONATHAN M. TISCH
New York, March 20, 2013

The writer, chairman of Loews Hotels, is chairman emeritus of the U.S. Travel Association.

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Letter: Campaign Spending

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Re "Companies: Show Us the Money," by Thomas P. DiNapoli and Bill de Blasio (Op-Ed, March 21):

The proposal before the Securities and Exchange Commission to compel corporations to disclose their campaign spending would undoubtedly aid the public in making informed decisions about candidates' supporters. For 40 years, the United States Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutionality and importance of disclosure — and did so again, ironically, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 ruling that helped unleash 2012's $6 billion election.

The lack of transparency is not the only problem, however. The last election was awash in money mainly because a rash of newly created nonprofit social welfare organizations saturated the airwaves in support of candidates. Such groups, regulated by the Internal Revenue Service, are permitted to do so provided that political activity is not their primary purpose.

But many of these pop-ups, on both sides of the aisle, appeared to be wholly political, with no trace of the normally required charitable purpose. If this perception is accurate, the I.R.S. should yank their tax-exempt status and penalize their principals for fraud.

In a welcome development, the I.R.S. announced last week that it has sent questionnaires to some 1,300 of these groups to check their bona fides and to ascertain the extent of their campaign activities. Let's see what we learn.

JERRY H. GOLDFEDER
New York, March 22, 2013

The writer is a lawyer specializing in election law and campaign finance compliance.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The New Russian Mob

I realize this is a somewhat irresponsible thought, but I keep wondering why anyone should care if some Russian oligarchs and businesses — and corrupt officials — lose a bundle in Cyprus.

Yes, I know, the European Union's original, ham-handed proposal — a tax on every bank deposit in Cyprus — was potentially destabilizing to the world's financial system. It raised the specter of bank runs not just in Cyprus but all over Europe. It served as a jolting reminder that the European crisis is still with us. Yada, yada.

But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment). Corrupt officials who embezzle money have long found Cyprus to be a friendly haven. Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this week that a substantial amount of the $230 million fraud perpetrated in 2007 against Hermitage Capital — a crime unearthed by Sergei Magnitsky, the brave lawyer who died in prison after he exposed the fraud — can be traced to Cyprus.

To put it another way, the henchmen of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, who have gotten rich by trampling over the rule of law, are now getting a taste of their own medicine. In Cyprus, with no warning, the rules changed, and deposits larger than 100,000 euros may now face "haircuts" of as much as 40 percent. Though the purpose of the tax is to save the country's banking system, the outcome is the same as when Russian officials create phony tax charges to steal a businessman's assets. People feel they are being robbed. And they become extremely upset.

The funniest part is that according to Reuters, some Russian entities are threatening to sue. Actually, that makes a certain perverse sense: one of the reasons Russian bureaucrats are so quick to move their newly stolen wealth out of Russia is that they want it in a place where the rule of law actually has some meaning. They don't want done to them what they've done to their fellow citizens.

Ever since Putin reclaimed the presidency last year, the trampling of the rule of law has only accelerated. It is now being used to stifle the last remnants of political opposition. There are lots of recent examples, like the bogus charges brought against Alexei Navalny, the heroic investigative blogger, and the posthumous case currently being prosecuted against, believe it or not, Sergei Magnitsky. And then there's the case of Dmitry Gudkov and his father, Gennady.

Both men were opposition politicians in Russia's Duma. Both supported the Sergei Magnitsky Act, which President Obama signed in December and which freezes the U.S. assets of Russian government officials who are labeled "gross human rights violators." Putin and his underlings are understandably threatened by the new law. They have retaliated by passing a bill banning the adoptions of Russian children by Americans. (That's right. The Putin government is getting back at the United States by punishing Russian orphans.)

Gennady Gudkov, a former K.G.B. official, had built a security company, Oskord, with some 4,000 employees. Last summer the government conducted an "inspection" and found the company to have committed numerous violations. It quickly put Oskord out of business. Two months later, a committee of the Duma charged Gudkov with violating Duma rules and tossed him out of Parliament.

Then, this month, Dmitry Gudkov, who was also one of only seven Duma members to oppose the adoption ban, made a weeklong trip to the United States. His primary purpose, he told me on Wednesday, was to investigate the adoption of Russian children in the U.S. But he also made a speech critical of Putin at a conference in Washington. He had been invited to speak by Pavel Khodorkovsky, the president of the Institute of Modern Russia — and the son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed former chief executive of Yukos and the leading symbol of Putin's callous indifference to the rule of law.

Upon his return, Gudkov was accused by Duma leaders of being a traitor. An investigation has begun. It is a good bet that he will soon be forced out of Duma, just like his father.

Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and now a leading Putin critic, gave me a simple framework for understanding how Putin and his henchmen operate. "It's like the mob," he said. "The only thing that matters is loyalty. The hit man must be loyal to the boss. The boss must protect the hit man."

In that case, maybe they should start thinking about the coming Cyprus haircut in terms they understand. It's protection money.

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Editorial: The California Marriage Case

Before the Supreme Court justices turned to the merits of the case on Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage, they seemed perplexed by a procedural issue: whether the petitioners had legal standing to appeal a lower-court ruling that struck down the ballot measure. Having taken the appeal, they cannot easily decide to avoid the substantive question of whether same-sex couples have a constitutionally protected right to marry in California and elsewhere in the country.

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If the court decides the case on the merits, it is hard to imagine that a majority could be swayed by the arguments offered by Charles Cooper, the lawyer for the marriage ban's supporters. Even if his presentation had been more fluent, there was no way to overcome the incoherence of his position.

The core of Mr. Cooper's argument was that a ruling allowing same-sex marriage would be "redefining" marriage in a way that undermines the "responsible procreation" of children. Yet California allows same-sex couples to adopt children, and many heterosexual couples who can't have children get married.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked him if — outside the marriage context — he could "think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens," he could not. When Justice Elena Kagan asked him to describe "what harm to the institution of marriage or to opposite-sex couples" would occur if same-sex couples were allowed to marry, he failed to provide a single example. He also contended that "debate over whether the age-old definition of marriage should be changed to include same-sex couples" should be left to the states but could not explain why the Constitution would permit this kind of discrimination.

Neither the Federal District Court in California nor the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found any of his arguments persuasive.

By contrast, Theodore Olson, representing the supporters of same-sex marriage, had the benefit of solid logic on his side. Noting the long line of Supreme Court cases that have declared marriage a fundamental right, he argued that society had no rational basis denying same-sex couples the dignity that marriage affords. Justice Antonin Scalia, with his familiar sarcasm, said: "I'm curious. When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage?" Mr. Olson politely answered with two questions: "When did it become unconstitutional to prohibit interracial marriages? When did it become unconstitutional to assign children to separate schools?"

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who may be a swing vote, remarked, "We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more." But he pointed out to Mr. Cooper, "There are some 40,000 children in California" with same-sex parents and "they want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?"

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., in support of Mr. Olson's clients, made a cautious, lawyerly argument that the court should rule that California and the seven other states that allow civil unions equivalent to marriage could not deny same-sex couples the status of marriage — and should leave for another day the broader issue as applied to all other states. But he acknowledged that "waiting is not a neutral act" and that it "imposes real costs."

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Op-Ed Columnist: Courting Cowardice on Same-Sex Marriage

As the arguments unfurled in Tuesday's case on same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court justices sounded more and more cranky.

Things were moving too fast for them.

How could the nine, cloistered behind velvety rose curtains, marble pillars and archaic customs, possibly assess the potential effects of gay marriage? They're not psychics, after all.

"Same-sex marriage is very new," Justice Samuel Alito whinged, noting that "it may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing." If the standard is that marriage always has to be "a good thing," would heterosexuals pass?

"But you want us to step in and render a decision," Alito continued, "based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cellphones or the Internet? I mean, we do not have the ability to see the future."

Swing Justice Anthony Kennedy grumbled about "uncharted waters," and the fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling. Their questions reflected a unanimous craven impulse: How do we get out of this? This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.

"Same-sex couples have every other right," Chief Justice John Roberts said, sounding inane for a big brain. "It's just about the label in this case." He continued, "If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, 'This is my friend,' but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend."

Donald Verrilli Jr., the U.S. solicitor general arguing on the side of same-sex marriage, told the justices, "There is a cost to waiting." He recalled that the argument by opponents of interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 was to delay because "the social science is still uncertain about how biracial children will fare in this world."

The wisdom of the Warren court is reflected two miles away, where a biracial child is faring pretty well in his second term in the Oval Office.

The American Academy of Pediatrics last week announced its support for same-sex marriage, citing evidence that children of gays and lesbians do better when the couples marry. It may take another case, even another court, to legitimize same-sex marriage nationally, but the country has moved on. An ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 81 percent of Americans under 30 approve of gay marriage. Every time you blink, another lawmaker comes out of the closet on supporting the issue.

Charles Cooper, the lawyer for the proponents of Prop 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, was tied in knots, failing to articulate any harm that could come from gay marriage and admitting that no other form of discrimination against gay people was justified. His argument, that marriage should be reserved for those who procreate, is ludicrous. Sonia Sotomayor was married and didn't have kids. Clarence and Ginny Thomas did not have kids. Chief Justice Roberts's two kids are adopted. Should their marriages have been banned? What about George and Martha Washington? They only procreated a country.

As Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out to Cooper, "Couples that aren't gay but can't have children get married all the time."

Justice Elena Kagan wondered if Cooper thought couples over the age of 55 wanting to get married should be refused licenses. Straining to amuse, Justice Antonin Scalia chimed in: "I suppose we could have a questionnaire at the marriage desk when people come in to get the marriage — you know, 'Are you fertile or are you not fertile?' "

Scalia didn't elaborate on his comment in December at Princeton: "If we cannot have moral feeling against homosexuality, can we have it against murder?"

Cooper replied that a 55-year-old man would still be fertile, which was a non sequitur, given that he hails marriage as a bulwark against "irresponsible procreative conduct outside of marriage."

He said that California should "hit the pause button" while "the experiment" of gay marriage matures. And he urged that we not refocus "the definition of marriage away from the raising of children and to the emotional needs and desires of adults." Did he miss the last few Me Decades?

The fusty legal discussion inside was a vivid contrast with the lusty rally outside. There were some offensive signs directed at gays, but the vibrant crowd was overwhelmingly pro same-sex marriage. One woman summed it up nicely in a placard reading "Gays have the right to be as miserable as I make my husband."

The only emotional moment in court was when Justice Kennedy brought up the possible "legal injury" to 40,000 children in California who live with same-sex parents. "They want their parents to have full recognition and full status," he told Cooper. "The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?"

While Justice Alito can't see into the future, most Americans can. If this court doesn't reject bigotry, history will reject this court.

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