No. 19 by The Baffler

No. 19

Contents 1 Philosophical Intelligence Office

Stories

Decrescendo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Summers

Salvos

Too Smart to Fail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes on an age of folly Thomas Fr ank

Give Her to Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya

Kim Stanley Robinson

2312 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Edge Lands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chris N. Brown

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maureen Tk acik

Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Poems

Jim Newell

Rick Perlstein

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

David Gr aeber

Future Schlock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creating the crap of tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab Will Boisvert

Revolt of the Gadgets . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert S. Eshelman

Chris Lehmann

Into the Infinite

The Animal Cure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101

Water World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Barbar a Ehrenreich

Notes & Quotes

54 60

Smells Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Eugenia Williamson

My Own Little Mission . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dubr avk a Ugrešić

Disposable Hip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

G. Beato

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107

112

Experts are Puzzled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laur a Riding

Odi Barbare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Geoffrey Hill

Strike! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Charles Bernstein Marilyn Hacker

Snow Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Peter Gizzi

Breaking Stones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nir ala

Little Princess, or the One-Eyed Girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nir ala

Documentia

Ancestors

Cotton Tenants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three families James Agee

100 158

166

We Told You So . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James K. Galbr aith

Syria Renga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Dollar Debauch

140

Lives of the Pundits

I Was a Teenage Gramlich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

128

152

Bafflers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

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Too Smart to Fail Notes on an age of folly 3 Thomas Fr ank The “sound” banker, alas! is not one who sees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows so that no one can really blame him.

— John Maynard Keynes

n the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last. First there was the “New Economy,” a millennial fever dream predicated on the twin ideas of a people’s stock market and an eternal silicon prosperity; it collapsed eventually under the weight of its own fatuousness. Second was the war in Iraq, an endeavor whose launch depended for its success on the turpitude of virtually every class of elite in Washington, particularly the tough-minded men of the media; an enterprise that destroyed the country it aimed to save and that helped to bankrupt our nation as well. And then, Wall Street blew up the global economy. Empowered by bank deregulation and regulatory capture, Wall Street enlisted those tough-minded men of the media again to sell the world on the idea that financial innovations were making the global economy more stable by the minute. Central banks puffed an asset bubble like the world had never seen before, even if every journalist worth his byline was obliged to deny its existence until it was too late. These episodes were costly and even disastrous, and after each one had run its course and duly exploded, I expected some sort of day of reckoning for their promoters. And, in10 1 The Baffler

deed, the last two disasters combined to force the Republican Party from its stranglehold on American government—for a time. But what rankles now is our failure, after each of these disasters, to come to terms with how we were played. Each separate catastrophe should have been followed by a wave of apologies and resignations; taken together— and given that a good percentage of the pundit corps signed on to two or even three of these idiotic storylines—themy mandated mass firings in the newsrooms and op-ed pages of the nation. Quicker than you could say “Ahmed Chalabi,” an entire generation of newsroom fools should have lost their jobs. But that’s not what happened. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of late, but the ones responsible for deluding the public are not among them. Neocon extraordinaire Bill Kristol won a berth at the New York Times (before losing it again), Charles Krauthammer is still the thinking conservative’s favorite, George Will drones crankily on, Thomas Friedman remains our leading dispenser of nonsense neologisms, and Niall Ferguson wipes his feet on a welcome mat that will never wear out. The day Larry Kudlow apologizes for slagging bubble-doubters as part of a sinister left-wing trick is the day the world will start spinning in reverse. Standard & Poor’s first leads the parade of folly (tripleA’s for everyone!), then decides to downgrade U.S. government debt, and is taken seriously in both endeavors. And the prospect of Fox News or CNBC apologizing for their role in puffing war bubbles and financial bubbles is no better than a punch line: what they do is the opposite, launching new movements that stamp their crumbled fables “true” by popular demand. The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts

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wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post. What I didn’t understand was that these were moral failures, mistakes that were hardwired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that— from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes—shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them. Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, for chrissake, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready should they fuck things up again.

Keep on Dancing Till the World Ends My aim here isn’t to take some kind of victory lap or to get in the granite faces of our eternal pundit corps one more time—honestly, who really wants to read a twenty-part takedown of the social philosophy of, say, Jim Cramer? Nor is it to blame Republicans for our problems. It is true that, from the scandal of CEO pay to the scandal of lobotomized regulators, each of the really monumental mistakes of our time arose from the trademark doctrines of the political right. And, yes, it was the Bush administration that installed as National Archivist a scholar much criticized for his questionable research methods, that muzzled government scientists, and that declared war on organized intelligence in a hundred other ways. But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that The Baffler ! 11

u Documenti a

We Told You So

An advance memorandum on the jitters 3 James K. Galbr aith

E arly summer 2008

ike many Americans, I was doing everything I could to help elect Barack Obama. It wasn’t all that much—but as an economist in Texas, I had some authority on the thinking of former Senator Phil Gramm, John McCain’s chief economic adviser. I’d made the front page of the Washington Post describing Gramm as a “sorcerer’s apprentice of financial instability and disaster.” (Gramm, with a certain sense of humor, denied it.) For that, and for my experience drafting policy papers, I was in contact every few days with Obama’s economists. To economists in my own circle, it had long been clear that the financial crisis then unfolding was an epic event. We had watched the subprime mortgage disaster build up. In August 2007 we knew the meltdown had begun. Bear Stearns had failed. But for reasons that have to do with the pace and rhythm of politics, these issues remained on the back burner, the campaign being dominated by health care and the Iraq war. For those of us on the outside, it was hard to know whether the insiders understood what was coming. And so it seemed a good idea to raise an alarm. But here you confront the Cassandra paradox: if you predict disaster, no one believes you. Economics is rife with alarmists; if the wolf really is at the door, it’s better to have a whole chorus saying so. For this I had the help of the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress, which convened a meeting in Paris. When you invite twenty friends to spend a few days in Paris in June, it’s rarely hard to persuade them to come.Among the Americans in the group were the editors of two important journals, a former United Nations financial expert, and the former federal regulator who had blown the whistle on the savings and loan 22 1 The Baffler

fraud. There were also senior specialists from France, Britain, India, China, and Brazil. The meeting had no political connection, but one result was a long memorandum, which I sent in early July to the Obama team. I do not know whether, or by whom, my memo was read. Not the slightest word came back. Yet the memo disproves the notion that nobody knew. To the group in Paris, three months before Lehman, what I wrote was obvious. It was our consensus view. What follows is an excerpt.

he most important common ground was over the depth and severity of the financial crisis. We placed it in a different league from all other financial events since the early thirties, including the debt crises of the eighties and the Asian and Russian crises of the late nineties. One of us called it “epochal” and “history-making.” And so it has turned out. What distinguishes this crisis from the others are three facts taken together: (a) it emerges from the United States, that is, from the center, and not the periphery, of the global system; (b) it reflects the collapse of a bubble in an economy driven by repetitive bubbles; and (c) the bubble has been vectored into the financial structure in a uniquely complex and intractable way, via securitization. Bubbles are endemic to capitalism, but in most of history they are not the major story. In the ninteenth century, agricultural price deflation was a larger problem. In the twentieth, industrialization and technology set the direction. It was only in the information technology bubble of the late nineties that financial considerations—including the rise

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I Was a Teenage Gramlich 3 Jim Newell

can’t say I ever intended from a young age to spend my eighteenth year mastering Washington Consensus–era monetary policy to recite in stuttering, rote cliché before a panel of mildly curious economic policymakers who filled out the payroll at Alan Greenspan’s Randian fiefdom. I didn’t play football, or soccer, or any of the other exhausting things; my fourth-grade rendition of “Hot Cross Buns” on the recorder didn’t give way to more ambitious musical pursuits; and the school newspaper already had a core stable of scribes to file the biweekly “Christina Aguilera vs. Britney Spears: Who’s Hotter?” trend pieces and listicles. What toptier private university would continue reading a student’s application after noting that he’d failed to deliver such scholastic contribution? So let’s settle on the market-friendly explanation: I was incentivized to take a spot on my high school’s Federal Reserve competition team that senior year, for lack of much else to do. And somehow, over a few months, I became fluent in the tongue of historically resolved, tightly synthesized neoclassical bullshit. The United States was insulated from any fundamental economic problems, the thinktank consensus maintained during my 2002– 2003 school year, but my generation would still be charged with resolving one or two pesky loose ends. In ten or twenty years, once the Treasury had funneled enough of its everexpanding annual surpluses into paying off the country’s entire public debt, who would stop it from malinvesting excess funds into private markets and causing “distortions”? Who would liberate the oppressed Social Security surplus from its lifelong imprisonment in low-yielding Treasury bills, sending it safely into the cozy trenches of speculative finance? Who would marry the next wave of Andrea Mitchells, play Sunday footsies with the unworthy heirs to Tim Russert, and Irish 28 1 The Baffler

Depending on how you remember it, this was either a few days before our president announced the successful resolution of hostilities in Iraq, or a few days after you and your neighbors took out your first second mortgages.

9 the Bethesda dinner party coffees of future George Wills as they retrofitted Fed anecdotes from the House of Plantagenet to shed light on current transportation policy? Why, the Fed Challenge kids would. And so that’s why I became a teenage supplicant at the enormous, glossy table that dominates the Board Room of the Federal Reserve one muggy Washington afternoon that April 2003. Depending on how you remember it, this was either a few days before our president announced the successful resolution of hostilities in Iraq, or a few days after you and your neighbors took out your first second mortgages. Until recently, I’d never watched tapes of the competition or bothered to look back at how well our presentation—crafted explicitly upon what various personalities at the Fed were saying at the time—held up. I can say now that we were accurately depicting what policymakers, ranging all the way from center-left to center-right, were saying. Had my long-term planning that year not been exclusively devoted to persuading one particular sophomore girl to date me, I might have noticed that the Fed was grooming types like me to carry the torch of efficient, market-allocated human welfare into the second generation of the Great Moderation, fully untethered from the stubborn demands of history

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and the clutches of modest inflation. But not everything went according to plan. Fed Challenge is, in the words of our gracious and still active economics teacher at Severn School in Severna Park, Maryland, Mr. Bodley, “a national economics competition that encourages a better understanding of our nation’s central bank.” Mr. Bodley—as his former high school student, I can’t possibly refer to him any other way—wrote this in a 1998– 1999 edition of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s PR publication, Equilibria. Here is how he laid out the basic Challenge procedure: A team of five students prepares and presents a 15-minute analysis of the U.S. economy, recommends a course of action with respect to interest rates, and then withstands a 10-minute

question-and-answer period from a panel of Federal Reserve economists. To prepare for the competition, students look at the same economic indicators and the same forces influencing the economy that our nation’s economic leaders examine.

And to lend extra verisimilitude to the whole proceeding, competitors are also advised, as we were, to act out the parts of real members of the Federal Open Market Committee. The idea at its simplest, at least when I was competing, was to imbue the next generation of American leaders with a grasp of the complexities of macroeconomic management— measuring the threat of inflation against the jobs outlook, taking stock of the curious twists and turns of consumer demand, the The Baffler ! 29

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Ronald Reagan’s Imaginary Bridges 3 Rick Perlstein

hen Ronald Reagan entered politics in the sixties, most observers judged him a joke. When Reagan announced he was running for the Republican nomination for California governor in 1966, the Washington Star described the “air of furtive jubilation down at Lassie for Governor headquarters.” When he won that nomination, Esquire wondered whether the Republican Party was so “bankrupt that it has to embrace Liberace for leadership.” Two decades later, Reagan was hailed as the earthly embodiment of America’s transcendent values. How did he do it? Part of the answer involves ideology, organizing, personalities: the stuff of conventional political history. But there’s another, more mystical part. As Nikita Khrushchev once said to Richard Nixon, “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” Ronald Reagan built bridges like that. The period to focus on here is the seventies. To understand why, return, for a moment, to the 1870s. Americans have been building invisible bridges for a long time, most assiduously after periods of national turmoil—like the one between 1860 and 1865, when more than 600,000 Americans slaughtered one another. Soon afterward, the combatants began carrying out sentimental rituals of reconciliation. Confederate soldiers paraded through Boston to the cheers of welcoming Yankee throngs. John Quincy Adams II proclaimed from the podium: “You are come so that once more we may pledge ourselves to a new union, not a union merely of law, or simply of the lips: not a union . . . of the sword, but gentlemen, the only true union, the union of hearts.” Dissenters were dismissed as intransigents. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison pointed

38 1 The Baffler

out that the new systems of agricultural labor, which were growing all over the South and which were guarded by Ku Klux Klan terror, scarcely differed from slavery. The New York Times sniffed, “Does [Mr. Garrison] really imagine that outside of small and suspicious circles any real interest attaches to the old forms of the Southern question?” Society expanded westward in violent thrusts, as industrialism wrenched yeoman farmers off the land, conscripted independent artisans into regimented factory work, and paved the way for Robber Baron fortunes, financial panics, and immigrant slums. Eighteen seventy-seven, the year Reconstruction ended, brought the worst labor strikes in American history. But patriotic societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution emerged as bulwarks against the threat of disunity. “Americanism” became the test of citizenship. “The man who would foment strife between East or West, North or South, between labor and capital or any section of our life, is the universal enemy,” a typical opinion leader thundered. Transcending strife—achieving consensus—was the meaning of the new nation. America the Innocent, searching for totems of a unity it can never quite achieve. It is one of the structuring stories of our nation: “the union of hearts” proclaimed by J.Q. Adams Jr. on Boston’s Bunker Hill parade ground, the “return to normalcy” enjoined by Silent Cal after the Great War, the cult of domesticity that followed the ordeal of World War II. In 1973, after ten years of war in Vietnam, America tried to do it again. When the prisoners of war returned, the White House and the Pentagon tried to orchestrate a good old-fashioned unifying ritual of patriotic renewal. Richard Nixon, speaking in the Oval Office to the Pentagon official

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v Th e D o l l a r D e b a u c h

Water World 3 Chris Lehmann

ere’s a little-noted quirk of our literary history, unlikely to turn up on the Trivial Pursuit board: the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Ernest Poole, devoted much of his writing career to cheering on the demise of capitalism. Poole won the prize for His Family, but as Patrick Chura notes in his introduction to this new edition of The Harbor (Penguin Press, $16.00), the distinction was understood “as belated recognition for Poole’s more celebrated earlier work.” In the context of Poole’s own cultural moment, his laurel is less incongruous than it seems in our present-day miniaturized literary scene, taken up as it is with tales of intrafamily redemption, therapeutic recovery, and baseball statistics. Indeed, it’s an awkward fact of American literary history that more than a few of its marquee names from the early twentieth century had been raging socialists. The Harbor, written in 1915, recalls a time when the marriage of literary ambition and political commitment routinely produced class-conscious novels and plays by the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Edward Bellamy, Upton Sinclair, and Eugene O’Neill. Sinclair and O’Neill followed Poole’s precedent, with O’Neill winning four Pulitzers for playwriting, and Sinclair claiming the award for his now-forgotten novel Dragon’s Teeth in 1945. Meanwhile, if Poole’s literary sensibility now seems alien to our own post-committed world of letters, his material feels quite contemporary. By an accident of publishing history, Penguin’s reissued edition of The Harbor contains plenty of echoes for our own unsettled, post-meltdown age. One climactic moment in the novel’s pageant of workingclass awakening occurs during a march of striking ship- and dock-workers up the stylish end of New York’s Fifth Avenue. Here’s the same vivid juxtaposition of the lords of 54 1 The Baffler

pelf and the lower orders that we’ve lately seen in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Following Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s callous expungement of OWS protestors from lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park last fall, Poole’s account of the strike parade makes for an edifying counternarrative—a distant transmission from a long-ago galaxy where working-class New Yorkers felt they could come confidently into possession of the whole metropolis. The novel’s narrator—a perennially ambivalent, echt-modernist writer named Billy, who has come to chronicle the uprising for the high-end magazine that usually employs him to file admiring profiles of the titans of industry—sums up the scene, and his awkward place in it, this way: The next afternoon the Fifth Avenue shops all closed their doors, and over the rich displays in their windows heavy steel shutters were rolled down. The long procession of motors and cabs with their gaily dressed shoppers had disappeared, and in their place was another procession, men, women, and children, old and young. All around me as I marched I heard an unending torrent of voices speaking many languages, uniting in strange cheers and songs brought from all over the ocean world. Bright-colored turbans bobbed up here and there, for there was no separation of races, all walked together in dense crowds, the whole strike family was here. And listening and watching, I felt myself a member now. Behind me came a long line of trucks packed with sick or crippled men. At their head was a black banner on which was painted “Our Wounded.” Behind the wagons a small cheap band came blaring forth a funeral dirge, and behind the band, upon men’s shoulder’s, came eleven coffins, in which were those dock victims who had died in the last few days. This section had its banner, too, and it was marked, “Our Dead.”

L E W I S KO C H

9 The struggle for justice in the workplace is plenty taxing on its own, without the added burden of producing existential meaning for restless bourgeois spirits. The Baffler ! 55

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Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit 3 David Gr aeber

Surely, as grown-ups, we understand that The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age.

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secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with. Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them? We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to the Laundromat. As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them. At the turn of the millennium, I was expecting an outpouring of reflections on why we had gotten the future of technology so wrong. Instead, just about all the authoritative voices—both Left and Right— began their reflections from the assumption that we do live in an unprecedented new technological utopia of one sort or another. The common way of dealing with the uneasy sense that this might not be so is to brush it aside, to insist all the progress that could have

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happened has happened and to treat anything more as silly. “Oh, you mean all that Jetsons stuff?” I’m asked—as if to say, but that was just for children! Surely, as grown-ups, we understand The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age. Even in the seventies and eighties, in fact, sober sources such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian were informing children of imminent space stations and expeditions to Mars. Creators of science fiction movies used to come up with concrete dates, often no more than a generation in the future, in which to place their futuristic fantasies. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick felt that a moviegoing audience would find it perfectly natural to assume that only thirty-three years later, in 2001, we would have commercial moon flights, city-like space stations, and computers with human personalities maintaining astronauts in suspended animation while traveling to Jupiter. Video telephony is just about the only new technology from that particular movie that has appeared—and it was technically possible when the movie was showing. 2001 can be seen as a curio, but what about Star Trek? The Star Trek mythos was set in the sixties, too, but the show kept getting revived, leaving audiences for Star Trek Voyager in, say, 2005, to try to figure out what to make of the fact that according to the logic of the program, the world was supposed to be recovering from fighting off the rule of genetically engineered supermen in the Eugenics Wars of the nineties. By 1989, when the creators of Back to the Future II were dutifully placing flying cars and anti-gravity hoverboards in the hands of ordiThe Baffler ! 67

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Future Schlock

Creating the crap of tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab 3 Will Boisvert

M A R K FI S H E R

90 1 The Baffler

f there is one beacon in the landscape of American industrial decline, it’s the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or so it seems to the science and business reporters who regularly troop through its doors for their “Ten Breakthroughs That Will Change the Way You Live” stories. The Lab yokes academic researchers backed by corporate money to the task of shepherding gonzo digital technology from high concept to working “demo,” and sometimes all the way to a product launch by a corporate funder or one of the startups that Lab alumni constantly spin off. To its many admirers, it’s a hothouse that nurtures bleeding-edge gear, hip capitalism, and the kind of disruptive innovations the New Economy needs to blow the next prosperity bubble. Making a pilgrimage to the Lab for its twenty-fifth anniversary last year, PBS NewsHour proposed it as the unanswerable “counterargument” to “Great Stagnation” talk of an innovation drought. Last October’s Atlantic rehashed the hype, hailing the Lab as an “idea factory” that “gather[s] the world’s most imaginative minds under one roof” to chart the profitable reconstruction of the physical and social order. “Our homes will be shapeshifters” and “our buildings will be printed” under the Lab’s new dispensation, the magazine proclaimed, while “your brain will be fixed like your car” and “your phone will know everything.” Sounds awesome—though, as always with techno-futurist propaganda, one feels in such forecasts the mailed fist of machine rationalization and job-killing automation beneath the velvet glove of consumer choice and convenience. But when you look at the stuff the Media Lab has made, not just “envisioned,” the results are neither dazzling nor scary, but underwhelming and a bit tacky. Translated into stuff, The Atlantic’s prophecy that “your electronics will be powered by you” boils down to the Lab’s “battery-free electric tambourine that lights up as it’s played.” The “you will be your doctor” scenario means “wristbands that measure stress,” apparently based on the Lab’s Q Sensor technology, which gauges galvanic skin response—that’s polygraph-ese for sweatiness—and tells you your level of “emotional arousal,” in case you didn’t already know it. NewsHour swoons over the Lab’s Gremlins-esque robot Leonardo, which enhances its furry cuteness by pricking up or flattening its ears, goggling its eyes and scrunching its adorable face, and gasps at PingPongPlus, which takes the familiar paddle game to “a whole new level of interactivity” by projecting animated displays of swimming fish onto the tabletop.

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lorified mood rings and plush toys, tambourines and ping-pong tables tricked out with blinking lights and screen-saver motifs: Is this the best the Media Lab can do? Not quite. Last year MIT posted a list of the Lab’s all-time “Top 25 Products and Platforms,” and the Q Sensor barely made the cut. Number 19 on the honor roll is the “Karaoke-on-Demand Machine, developed by Taito Corporation” from seventeen-year-old Lab technology. Number 16 is the technology behind photomosaics, the world’s most hackneyed graphic technique. Number 3 is Lego’s Mindstorms, a robotics kit beloved of school science fairs and adult hobbyists. Number 2? Guitar Hero. Yeah, they made that, one of the best-selling throw-away video games ever. Number 1 is the e-reader technology in Kindle, so give the Lab its due: it has spawned a subset of the video screens that are destroying the Republic of Letters. The Lab’s website reveals more wonders in the pipeline: an app that lets you order food on your cellphone while you are sitting in the restaurant; electronic origami (“The crane silently flaps on its own”); and a technology called Tastes Like Rain that “dynamically alters the flavor and color of your morning toothpaste to give you today’s temperature The Baffler ! 91

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of the Pun dits

Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic 3 Maureen Tkacik

Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep.

— Mary Baker Eddy

ot long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. All the unctuous little scabs who believe the future of words lies in rearranging them online would soon (inter alia) barge into the office of Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur to trumpet their e-vindication. But they evidently forgot to wonder how much of The Atlantic’s profitability owes to operating conferences, panels, and events like the 2010 Ideas Forum. These in-gatherings count as journalism only in the vague sense that they invite journalists to crowd into plushly appointed suites. At the Ideas Forum, The Atlantic’s own editorial staff was relegated to providing rapid-fire stenography services, to ensure the event was branded and promoted in real time on the website. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. What could anyone write about something so tyrannically dull— other than an angry elegy for the massacre of meaning? The average C-SPAN 3 segment is a crowd-pleasing cliffhanger by comparison. Mind flickering between rage and somnolence, I tried my best to keep awake 112 1 The Baffler

by writing notes. Here are some highlights, with names redacted to preserve the integrity of the tedium. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?”—there were two things, his interviewee insists—and occasional use of unauthorized verbiage like “re-regulate” to denote efforts to reverse the epochal dismantling of financial regulatory apparatus largely undertaken by the technocratic clique to which [Treasury Secretary] owes his entire career. [Obama Cabinet official], [Obama policy adviser], [billionaire CEO], [billionaire private equity tycoon], and [billionaire mayor] sing praises of [photogenic local schools chief whose extensive sackings of teachers and principals had been sufficiently unpopular with voters to have cost her boss the recent D.C. mayoral primary]. One refers to [recently released charter school propaganda-mentary] as her “Rosa Parks moment.” [Billionaire CEO] expresses dismay that “laws are written by lobbyists.” [Billionaire mayor] expresses indignation that some 40 percent of Americans do not pay income tax. [Prominent Democratic Lobbyist and his Lobbyist Wife] emphatically deny the notion that the “deck is stacked” against [public interest] under current system on the basis that “everyone has a lobbyist . . . nurses have lobbyists, unions have lobbyists, everybody has a lobbyist. Everyone in this audience has an iPhone or a PDA because lobbyists created a competitive system [that] enabled this whole industry to grow; lobbying can be very good for consumers.”

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M I C H A E L D U FF Y

“All the restless curiosity and faculties of [the] mind are irresistibly bent in one direction . . . : in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins . . .” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot The Baffler ! 113