Adam Gopnik examines his native country (the United States) and three adopted ones (Canada, Britain, and France), and attempts to locate their core irrationalities:
Let me start with my own country – don’t worry, your turn is coming. The core irrationality of American life is its insularity, which can be captured in three words: The World Series.
This is, of course, the annual championship of the American-invented game of baseball, a championship played almost exclusively in American cities and, until recently, entirely by American players – yet still referred to, without a hint of irony, as the global championship.
In all my years in the US, not once have I ever heard any American who found this name mildly ironic, or even strange. It is not even a rueful national joke. It’s just a fact of life, and when you point out its absurdity, you get a puzzled look.
It isn’t just baseball. The winners of the Superbowl in our US version of football cry out “We’re world champs!” as the gun sounds – and they do the same at the end of the American championship of the world sport of basketball.
When Americans play other Americans in American cities for an American audience, the world championship of whatever sport they are playing is thereby decided.
The real irony is that there is an actual world championship in baseball – and Americans do very badly at it. No one cares. It is broadcast on an obscure cable channel and no one pays any attention as the Dominicans or the Japanese triumph.
Every spring, the title question is inevitably posed by wide-eyed, sleep-deprived high school seniors to their peers. The rat race otherwise known as the college admissions process in the United States is nearing its end (too slowly, for some).
In a guest post on Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post, Liz Willen from The Hechinger Report (shout out to Teachers College, Columbia University!) brilliantly captured the ritualistic process to which rankings-obsessed teens and parents around the country subject themselves year after year:
Listen closely, and the list of rejected valedictorians, team captains and accomplished test-takers will go on and on. You may even hear navel-gazing parents and students who received too many thin envelopes ask themselves, “Where did we go wrong?”
Willen’s point, however, is that this whole hubbub we (yes, I’m guilty of it, too) have built up throughout the academic year is completely wrong-headed, in terms of how it portrays higher education and in relation to what higher education actually means.
English: Teacher’s College, 2004. Christopher Matta, free to use for any purpose. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On my regular bus to Teachers College the other day, the quiet space I occupied alone in the back was suddenly overrun by high school seniors speaking much too loudly for a public space. Initially annoyed at having my peace and quiet disturbed, I became intrigued at the banter thrown around from one corner of the bus to another.
Student A: You applied to Harvard?? You know only like 6% get admitted, right?!
Student B: I know…
Student A: That means, if you filled up this bus with 100 people, only 6 people would get in!
Conversations like these are precisely the target of Ms. Willen’s post:
We go wrong by engaging in this wrong-headed, waste-of-time conversation at all, and by comparing our kids’ test scores and GPAs, their merits and drawbacks. Sure, it’s seductive to be drawn into side-by-side comparisons and speculate about the “secret formula” for getting into top schools like Brown University, where 28,919 applicants vied for acceptances that totaled just 2,649.
Even the new movie starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, Admission, has contributed to this cycle of hair-pulling and eye-gouging.
In the new comedy Admission, the Princeton admissions officer played by Tina Fey is repeatedly asked to divulge that formula.
“Just be yourself,” Fey falsely answers. The film illustrates how largely unsuccessful such advice is by showing a parade of accomplished applicants falling through the floor of Princeton’s committee room and into oblivion.
Unfortunately, the movie perpetuates Ivy League angst, promoting the wrong conversation in a country where community colleges enroll more than half of the students in higher education—and where the percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 64 with a two- or four-year college degree is just 38.7 percent.
How often have we heard this statement of “just be yourself?” Few colleges I know of actually say that, though. (For more on the waste-of-time conversation that Ms. Willen points out, these three words recently got lots of play after a satirical WSJ op-ed by a high school senior and a subsequently swift response via Gawker.)
College access and affordability issues have long been the focus of my research, and as such, it’s what I’ve written about. But, the real conversation about college admissions that Ms. Willen notes is absolutely a critical dialogue: it’s not about where you go to college; it’s about what you do in college.
While the general perception is that having a degree from an Ivy League school, Stanford, or MIT automatically trumps a degree from most other institutions, the truth is our focus should be on the substance of the degrees and not the degrees themselves.
And until all the guidance, mentorship, and training that we can offer high school students truly helps them and their families embrace substance over style as a key outcome of higher education, we’ll be having this same conversation next spring.
Shooting a scene of The Americans just outside Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. Thursday, March 28, 2013.
That’s right: two references in one headline. “Safe House” refers to this week’s episode of FX’s The Americans, and the rest of it…well, just have a look at this. As for the recap of Wednesday’s episode, you’ve come to the right place. And away we go.
Jay: I gotta say, when Amador showed up in that parking lot behind Phil after having already run into him at the Beemans’ party, I really thought they’d stolen our April Fool’s Day fake episode narrative and turned it into a real storyline on the show.
But that might not have even been my favorite part. Even better was when the FBI agents began to discuss plans for killing Arkady (a conversation that took place in the kitchen of a dinner party, improbably: welcome back, The Americans) — and I immediately knew it couldn’t possibly happen, because I’d just seen the actor who plays him filming a scene on the Upper West Side last week.
The usual complaints still apply here, although they were slightly mitigated by the uptick in action. Throughout the episode, it seemed as if neither Phil nor Elizabeth had any real idea what they were going to do with Amador. In some ways, this echoed their indecision of the pilot episode, which ultimately also ended in the victim’s untimely demise. (The general rule on The Americans seems to be that, if you’re working for either American or Soviet intelligence and you end up in the Jennings’ custody, you’re probably screwed. If you’re just an innocent bystander — like the son of that poor old lady who got poisoned by Elizabeth — well, you’ll be OK eventually.) Continue reading Find yourself a “Safe House,” or a relative close by…you’re probably wanted for murder — Sam Lim and I discuss The Americans, Episode 9→
Adam Gopnik has penned a beautiful piece for The New Yorker that gets to the heart of the American gun problem:
And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work, because the “smokers” in this case feel something less tangible and yet more valued than their own health is at stake. As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.”
…
We should indeed be as tolerant as humanly possible about other people’s pleasures, even when they’re opaque to us, and try only to hive off the bad consequences from the good. The trouble is that assault weapons have no good consequences in civilian life. A machine whose distinguishing characteristic is that it can put a hundred and sixty-five lethal projectiles into the air in a few moments has no real use except to kill many living things very quickly. We cannot limit its bad uses while allowing its beneficial ones, because it has no beneficial ones.
Last month, I noted an article by The New York Times‘ Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, in which the two reported a long-term, steady decrease in gun ownership. They explained:
The findings contrast with the impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles after the massacre last year at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
“There are all these claims that gun ownership is going through the roof,” said Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. “But I suspect the increase in gun sales has been limited mostly to current gun owners. The most reputable surveys show a decline over time in the share of households with guns.”
In my post, after providing three examples of recent Times articles (here, here, and here) that had noticeably contributed to the aforementioned “flurry of news reports” about people rushing to buy guns, I concluded:
One can be forgiven for reading The New York Times and leaving with the impression that, yes, the entire country is stampeding its nearest weapons shops and loading up on anything with a trigger. This is just the latest in a long line of examples of the media helping to create a story, then reporting on the fallout from that story from a detached perspective, as if the press had nothing to do with the preceding whirlpool of artificially manufactured “news” in the first place.
Guns shops were jammed. Gun manufacturers were angry. Gun-control advocates were thrilled. Many legislators were torn.
But as President Obama on Tuesday announced a visit to Connecticut next week in the wake of an agreement on a far-ranging package of state gun legislation, Connecticut was bracing for the consequences, intended or not.
The most immediate result of the agreement, which came more than three months after the massacre of 26 children and educators in Newtown, was a run on gun shops on Tuesday, following months of already brisk sales. Gun owners are rushing to buy weapons, ammunition and magazines in anticipation of limits on their sale and possession.
…
Vic Benson, co-owner of the Freedom Shoppe, a gun shop in New Milford, said that his store was not usually even open on Tuesday, but that he opened its doors in anticipation of panicked buyers, and also to get rid of inventory he thinks he will be unable to sell after lawmakers vote on Wednesday.
The only indication in this entire article that all is not as depicted is the muted phrase “Gun owners are rushing…” — meaning that it is current owners, and not prospective gun buyers, that are leading the proverbial charge.
Look, the point isn’t that the Times shouldn’t cover news. And to some extent, delirious gun enthusiasts rushing their nearest weapons depot for a recharge so they can continue to shoot their high-powered guns with impunity even after stricter gun control legislation is passed is news.
Nevertheless, I would venture to guess that the Times‘ venerable voice is not well-utilized by devoting significant space in at least four articles in just over three months to the wildly exaggerated fears of armed paranoiacs. Perhaps, for example, some of those column inches could go towards additional coverage of shooting victims. Or of car dealerships, baseball, or whatever. After awhile, one starts to get the point: a lot of people love guns, and the Times is all over it.
But the larger point is that it’s ludicrous to continue covering these gun shop rushes on the one hand, while simultaneously remarking — as Tavernise and Gebeloff did — on the misleading “impression left by a flurry of news reports about people rushing to buy guns and clearing shop shelves of assault rifles,” as if the Times itself had nothing to do with creating this perception.
This paradox is especially concerning precisely because of what Tavernise and Gebeloff point out: gun ownership is decreasing. So publishing article after article portraying gun shops as overwhelmed by the demand for their products not only makes for boring reading, but doesn’t really present an accurate picture either.
The month of March was a good one for The First Casualty. On several occasions in the past, I’ve mentioned that the site has been growing pretty quickly from month to month, but I’ve never shared specific numbers. So just for fun, I decided to open the kimono a bit this time — if for no other reason than to use the phrase “open the kimono,” which I have always found both overwhelmingly creepy and hilarious.
As the above graph illustrates, there’s a clear upward trend from January through March. The bars representing pageviews and visitors align with the axis at left, and the line representing posts corresponds to the axis at right. So last month I published 50 posts (many of which were written by Victoria Kwan and Sam Lim) and had 3,722 pageviews from 2,656 visitors.
A brief explainer: although I’ve been posting at jaypinho.com since December 2010 (and at 50 Books for 2010 since January of that year: all of the posts from that blog are archived and searchable here), I didn’t start making it a regular thing until roughly the end of September last year. Previously, it had been a hit-or-miss affair. Now it’s more of a project. Anyway, the huge drop-off from December 2012 to January of this year is simply due to the fact that I was in mainland China for the first two-thirds of January and had extremely limited access to social media (including WordPress) during that time.
However, while the pageviews and visitors decreased that month since I was posting less, the proportion (pageviews per post, for example) actually increased from December to January. But it wasn’t until March that it really took off: we came within 107 pageviews of besting The First Casualty‘s record month of December 2012 (3,828 views), but with fewer than half the posts (106 last December, only 50 this March).
The point? You guys — whoever you are out there in the Internet mists, scouring cyberspace for SCOTUS analysis, media criticism, and Red Sox fandom alike — have been great. Even better, there are more of you now than before. So thank you. Lastly, please feel free to post comments liberally (by which I mean “as much as you’d like:” comments from all across the political spectrum are welcomed).
But that might not have even been my favorite part. Even better was when the FBI agents began to discuss plans for killing Arkady (a conversation that took place in the kitchen of a dinner party, improbably: welcome back, The Americans) — and I immediately knew it couldn’t possibly happen, because I’d just seen the actor who plays him filming a scene on the Upper West Side last week.
