Questions for the Hive Mind

I have been preparing for the GRE the past few days. The new analytical writing section does present problems for evaluation: how does one know one is doing an ok job? It just struck me today that perhaps I could use the hive mind to see how I am doing. So I'm going to paste below the two essays I wrote today. Could you, gentle readers, give me feedback about my language? Examples: too long! Cut out the dross! Make your sentences shorter and less pompous! Cut to the chase! Etc. Feedback on my writing style would be much appreciated (feedback on the content would be great too).


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Issues topic. 45 minutes. Both the development of technological tools and the uses to which humanity has put them have created modern civilizations in which loneliness is ever increasing.

Answer:

In this essay, I am going to offer a historical narrative to back up the claim that our modern technological innovations, along with the way of life they helped usher (or in other words, the way we used them), have made us lonelier than we were before. To do this, I will sketch briefly how life was before, and immediately after, the Industrial Revolution. I will then sketch how modern life is today and bring out the trade-offs that this change in the way we live has entailed.

Two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution began in Europe, most of the world’s population lived in villages, in what can be described as closely-knit communities. The number of occupations were limited: one could be a farmer or an artisian of some sort (like a carpenter, or a blacksmith) or a trader who sold certain goods. Families were bigger and extended families lived closer together. Occupations were, more often than not, heriditary. A carpenter's son was most likely to first be an apprentice to his father, and then become a carpenter himself, staying on in the same village and becoming a part of the same community where he grew up. (He could not, for instance, opt to become a blacksmith.) Women probably helped in the occupations as well but officially did not work at all. They also performed all the housework, which was much more back-breaking then and presumably got married into one or the other of the local families in the community. There were hardly any new arrivals in the community which meant that a community tended to be static: as older people died, their descendents succeeded them.

Most importantly, there was no difference between one's work life and one's personal life, as there is in the modern world. One's "colleagues" at work were also one's family and friends. The customers were also people one knew, perhaps even by name. There was, in other words, an overlap into what today one could call the private sphere and the work sphere. Transactions were social rather than market-based. Life was less impersonal than it is now. This society had a lot less freedom when it came to choosing occupations or in doing something different from one's family - and yet, there was also a concrete sense of belonging, of being rooted in the present and in tradition. One knew exactly what one's place in the community was. There was less loneliness.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that. The establishment of factories meant that rural populations moved away from rural areas into the now-burgeoning urban areas. They did this because this offered them a way of avoiding the poverty and the number of limited jobs in rural areas. To be sure, the conditions in rural areas were not the best: overcrowding, bad sanitation, and pollution was rampant, the conditions in factories were horrible and often dangerous -- yet it was a marginal improvement.

Yet the new arrivals in the cities found themselves ungrounded -- they lived in impersonal communities where they did not know many people. There was hardly any family around. When they bought things, it was often from people they did not know. They changed jobs often and so their work "colleagues" changed often too. All of this contributed to a sense of dislocation -- a sense that one did not know what one was doing, what one's place in this world was, or in other words, loneliness.

Things are not so much different today. In the West, conditions in factories are now much better and the number of white collar or "services" jobs have increased. Pollution has gone down. Yet the conditions that the Industrial Revolution gave birth to have only intensified. We maintain a strict separation between our work life and our personal life. Our transactions are impersonal, market-based. We buy our daily groceries at an impersonal supermarket rather than from soemone we're friends with. We rarely talk to our neighbors, many times because we spend most of our time working and the rest, catching up with our family. The size of the family has decreased; the connection to one's extended family -- cousins, aunts, uncles -- have decreased too. We may be more free today in terms of the occupations we choose, or the rights we enjoy - but we lack the grounding that our ancestors enjoyed, their sense of rootedness and place.

To conclude, all major social changes involve trade-offs. The technological innovations of the past two hundred-odd years have improved our lives substantially. In the West, at least, the number of people who live in back-breaking poverty are few. New technologies have made us efficient at work and made many new things possible: air travel, space travel, satellites, television, the internet. They've also increased an individual's freedom and today an individual is free to choose his occupation, his mate, his faith or his place of residence. But in doing all this, they've cut us off from the rootedness and the sense of place that our ancestors had. We're more lonely today, we search more for our place in this world. Most of us would also argue though that this is only a fair trade-off.

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Analysis of argument essay (30 minutes). Six months ago the region of Forestville increased the speed limit for vehicles traveling on the region's highways by ten miles per hour. Since that change took effect, the number of automobile accidents in that region has increased by 15 percent. But the speed limit in Elmsford, a region neighboring Forestville, remained unchanged, and automobile accidents declined slightly during the same six-month period. Therefore, if the citizens of Forestville want to reduce the number of automobile accidents on the region's highways, they should campaign to reduce Forestville's speed limit to what it was before the increase.

Answer:

In the passage, the author makes the argument that the increased rate of accidents in Forestville is caused by the increase in speed limit that the town enacted six months ago. The claim is closely argued but could be considerably strengthened if the author provided more data. In the essay that follows, I will outline some of the deficiencies in the argument and also what the author could do to fix them.

First, let us consider the merits of the argument. The author compares the accident rate of Forestville to that of the neighboring town of Elmsford and finds that the rate in Elmsford decreased slightly over the same time period that the rate in Forrestville increased by 15%. This is a good point. Forestville and Elmsford are reasonably close which means that their traffic is roughly similar (the same cars pass through both towns) and they presumably have many similarities in terms of climate and road conditions. It is certainly possible that the accident rate in Forrestville increased while that in Elmsford fell because the speed limits in Forrestville were raised six months ago.

That said, this is hardly a water-tight argument. First the six month window is too small to reach any definitive conclusions. It is possible that this jump in the accident rate is just statistical noise and that the accident rate will fall back to where it was before and stay there. Or it is possible that that the with the speed limit raised, drivers had a problem adjusting to the limit. Once they are used to it, the accident rate could fall to the same level as before the speed limit was raised.

Secondly, the author seems to have ignored other factors that could have been responsible for the increase in the accident rate in Forestville. For instance, is it not possible that certain roads passing through Forestville were closed in those six months, leading to increased traffic on certain other roads and hence an increased accident rate? Or could it be that the snowstorms that occured in the last 6 months could be the cause of the the increased accident rate? Could it be that the roads passing through Forestville are more winding and curved (reflecting perhaps that it is situated at a higher altitude) that is responsible for the accidents? To some extent, the fact that Elmsford did not experience an increase in its accident rate mitigates these points. But a more thorough investigation is needed on this score to eliminate other factors that could have been responsible for the increase.

To summarize, the author's argument definitely has a certain plausibility. But he needs to eliminate other possibilities and provide more data before a categorical case can be made that Forestville's rising accident rate is caused by its recently-increased speed limits.

Equus

This line from Christopher Durang (via David Edelstein) is probably the finest, most concise dissection of Equus:

“You’re afraid of feeling, of emotion. That’s wrong, Prudence, because then you have no passion. Did you see Equus? The Doctor felt it was better to blind eight horses in a stable with a metal spike than to have no passion. In my life I’m not going to be afraid to blind the horses, Prudence.”

Ha. Now, unlike the plodding movie starring Richard Burton, I should mention that reading Equus was a thrilling experience although I missed watching the one that played in New York recently (and yes, starred Harry Potter).

A. O. Scott on Bruno

I've always thought that the Sacha Baron-Cohen brand of humor, in which we get to both, laugh at his antics (which we know, are exaggerated) and at the people who get taken in by them (to whom, of course, we also feel superior to) was not as funny as people seemed to think it was*. But read A. O. Scott on Bruno since he expresses these thoughts so much more elegantly.

* And no, I never did get to see Borat, but don't really think I missed much by seeing it.

inamorata, anyone?

A. O. Scott shows off his vocabulary today. Inamorata, anyone?

As in the previous installment (also directed by Carlos Saldanha), one element of “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” manages to be authentically charming, and also to make moderately ingenious use of the 3-D techniques that otherwise just add to the jostle and noise. I’m referring, of course, to the dialogue-free sequences, unrelated to the main plot, that involve a plucky proto-squirrel known as Scrat and his quixotic pursuit of an acorn. This time Scrat is distracted by love, and he and his inamorata, who is also his rival for possession of that acorn, breath whimsical, inventive life into the movie.

Quote of the day

Matt Yglesias:

Nobody will ever be able to tell friends he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail again.

That's right.

Sigh, the story of my life

The story of my life, via Noah Millman (suitably modified, of course, for my life, but I'll let you fill in the gaps):

When I got out of school, my ambition was to write. And I started a novel, as yet unfinished.

I worked on the book for a number of years, but increasingly my “day job” – that is to say, my career – got in the way. But that’s not really a fair way to put it: it’s fairer to say that my career was an escape, a kind of grand procrastination scheme.

Then, as my career advanced, my writer’s itch returned. I started blogging, in part to scratch that itch, but also as a way of procrastinating from the responsibilities of my career.

Now, lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to blog. Sometimes I really want to write about A, and wind up blogging about B as a way of procrastinating from writing about what I want to write about. Sometimes I just kill time.

And when I take the next step, and find ways of procrastinating from killing time to avoid blogging to escape my job to forget my novelistic ambitions . . .

(But perhaps I’ve just done it?)

Life Imitating Art or Vice Versa

Question: Does this not remind you of something?

Court Eases Rules on Questioning Suspects - NYTimes.com: "The ruling Tuesday was in the case of Jesse Montejo, who was sentenced to death for the murder and robbery of Louis Ferrari in September 2002. Mr. Montejo was arrested a day after Mr. Ferrari was found dead in his home in Slidell, La. Suspicion focused on Mr. Montejo because he was known to associate with a disgruntled former employee of Mr. Ferrari’s dry-cleaning business.

Mr. Montejo was read his Miranda rights, arising from the landmark 1966 Supreme Court ruling that a defendant must be told of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer present virtually from the moment he is taken into custody. Under questioning, Mr. Montejo repeatedly changed his story, at first blaming the former employee, then admitting that he had shot the victim during a botched burglary.

At a preliminary hearing, a judge ordered that a public defender be appointed. The timing is in dispute, but at some point Mr. Montejo was read his Miranda rights again and agreed to accompany detectives to locate the murder weapon, which he had indicated that he had thrown into a lake.

During the trip, he wrote a letter of apology to the victim’s widow, using paper and pen provided by the detectives. Only upon his return did Mr. Montejo meet with his lawyer, who was furious that his client had been questioned in his absence, and was further incensed when the letter was admitted as evidence at trial.

Mr. Montejo’s conviction was upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which reasoned in part that the protections of the 1986 Michigan case should not apply to him because, in Louisiana as in many other states, lawyers are assigned automatically to indigent defendants, removing any question of whether Mr. Montejo specifically “requested” counsel at his arraignment."

Answer: The second episode of The Wire where Bunk and McNulty pressurize D'Angelo Barksdale:

Meanwhile, McNulty and Bunk show up at the low rise projects to intimidate D'Angelo. They take him downtown to interview him but first Daniels insists that Greggs participate. McNulty resists, but slowly realizes she is a smart cop. They play to D'Angelo's vulnerabilities, convincing him that the dead witness Gant was a church-going family man whose wife is dead and whose three children — showings him a picture of Bunk's three kids to corroborate this — now have no parents. D'Angelo is clearly moved, and agrees to write a letter to the three kids, telling them he is sorry their father was murdered. As he finishes the letter, his uncle's attorney Maurice Levy shows up and berates him for writing or saying anything at all.

Glee

I've been hearing on and off about Glee in the past few days -- the new Fox series that had its premiere recently. Nothing that made me go watch it, of course. But today, as I was surfing the web, I was inspired to Google it (click here, then here for why, if you can figure it out -- a perfect example of how surfing the web takes you off in all kinds of tangents) which led me to this EW page, where I discovered that the lovely Lea Michele stars in Glee (A quick check confirmed that this was indeed the case).

As some of you may know, I thought that Michele's Wendla Bergman was the best thing in the lovely Spring Awakening (and I loved the play and thought most of the actors were spot-on but she still stood out). I think I am going to watch that episode of Glee when I go home tonight.

UPDATE: I am watching it, I should note, not because I expect great things from it (far from it) but because I am curious to see how Michele's soulful stage singing and performance translate on television.

UPDATE 2: Watched it. Sigh, what on earth was I expecting? Stale dialogue that the actors try to redeem as much as they can. Stereotypes. More stereotypes. A few funny moments. A tone that jumps between knowing smirky humor ("chicks don't have prostates") and sickly sweet earnestness ("I want to lead a life of passion"). I suppose the only reason for the show's existence are the songs -- and I should admit that the songs were fun.

Claire Messud on Colm Toibin

I loved Claire Messud's review of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn in the latest New York Review of Books although, because of some kink of the NYRB's website I can't seem to be able to link to it on here.

Plato-lite

Brad Delong writes by way of Plato:

Agathon: "Under appropriate conditions of perfect competition, non-increasing returns, and the absence of externalities the market's decisions about the production and allocation of goods and services attain a point on the Pareto frontier. Every point on the Pareto frontier maximizes some social welfare function."

Glaukon: "Yes, of course."

Agathon: "Therefore the market, considered as a collective mechanism for making social decisions, chooses to maximize a particular social welfare function. It is instructive to consider what that social welfare function is."

Glaukon: "I resent the tone in which you are talking down to me."

Agathon: "You do not. This part of this conversation never took place in even approximate form in the real world. It is interpolated in order to bring readers of this weblog up to speed. Since I never said my last speech to you, you could not have resented it."

Glaukon: "And I want readers of this weblog to know that I am considerably smarter and more clued-in than he is letting me appear to be."

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Plato at least worked harder to make his information dumps fit more gracefully into the conversation. I want a better author.

Agathon: "Are you quite finished?"

Glaukon: "Yes."

Read the whole thing!

Good Critic, Bad Critic

I am often asked why I like to read book reviews, and what it is that they really do. I mean: why not read the original book, for God's sake? It's a hard question and the best answer is, as it often is , the pragmatic one. With non-fiction, book reviews often serve as a substitute for the book itself. With fiction, it is harder to justify. But life is short, so is time and when one has a pile of books to read, it only makes sense to be judicious when adding to it.

I bring this up because I read three reviews of a book recently and taken together, they all bring out the fine line between book reviews that function as, well, just book reviews and book reviews that manage to be works of genuine criticism.

The book in question is the latest sensation from France: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

For a book review that is truly nothing more than book review, see Michiko Kakutani's review in the New York Times.

For a review that rises to the level of criticism, see Daniel Mendelsohn's fine, searching analysis in the New York Review of Books.

And for a review that is written in the spirit of criticism but doesn't quite make it primarily because it follows the fairly predictable arc of the New Republic takedown, see Ruth Franklin's review for the New Republic. (I knew what she was going to say even before I started reading the first paragraph and true to form, she didn't disappoint.)

(Interestingly, both Franklin and Mendelsohn make some of the same points, but they both take them in different directions. In Kakutani's defence, she has to summarize the book and evaluate it in just 2 pages so she really doesn't have that much space to produce genuine criticism.)

[X-posted at Crack a Book.]

Old Joy

A line from Jon Raymond's Livability that has been playing in my mind since I finished reading the story:

What is sorrow? I thought. What is sorrow but old, worn-out joy?

Articles without a point?

I've never understood the purpose of articles like this (now at the top of the NYT "Most Emailed" list).

I understand the purpose is to be funny and wacky but to my mind, this one goes way off the mark. The overwrought hysterical tone doesn't help although I suppose some find it funny. Now if you want something really funny about technology, then check out this video (the embedding is disabled, sorry): the tone is perfect, IMHO. Learn something from it, Virginia!

Best line I read today

There's a nice Q&A with Q & A (now Slumdog Millionaire) author Vikas Swarup in the Times. I say nice because I developed a liking for the man just by reading it. After all how can you not like someone who says:

You’ve described the book-to-film process as giving away one’s daughter in marriage. But you consulted with Simon Beaufoy over a couple of preliminary drafts. Did you have major input on the screenplay?

I only made a few suggestions. They had $20 million riding on this film. My comfort level was high. If I tinkered with it too much and the film didn’t do well, they might say, “You scuppered our chances.” Simon told me he loved the novel and would remain faithful to the soul of the book. But when somebody tells you they will be faithful to the soul, you know the body will get mangled.

Duplicity

Someone give Clive Owen an award -- because he really REALLY deserves one.

I first saw Owen in Robert Altman's Gosford Park. And even though I watched it in a dark dorm room, on a tiny, stained, computer screen, from a pirated VCD with dark visuals and bad sound that rendered most dialogue incomprehensible, he was still a vivid presence. Gosford Park defined the way I've always looked at Owen since: as the brooding, swarthy, lethal guy, someone you don't want to cross. This is pretty much the persona he projected in his other roles: in Spike Lee's Inside Man and above all, in Mike Nichols Closer.

In Duplicity, which reunites Owen with Closer co-star Julia Roberts, Owen manages the feat of appearing dangerous, competent and goofy, all at the same time. His character, Ray, is a spy (or whatever it is that CIA operatives are supposed to be); a very competent one, we're given to understand, who, unfortunately, goes weak in the knees when he comes face-to-face with a certain woman. And since that certain woman is played by Julia Roberts, perhaps the star of our time, I found it entirely believable. No, actually, let me change that. Owen and Roberts make it entirely believable.

This time the roles from Closer are reversed: she is pretty much in charge and he is understandably smitten by her. (Or is he? It is a testament to Owen's brooding image that I expected him to pull one over her at the last moment -- after all, no one crosses Clive Owen like that!) Writer-director Gilroy gives them lines that ricochet off each other and Roberts and Owen make the most of it. Their banter is perhaps not quite of the same intensity as Hepburn and Grant's in The Philadelphia Story. The difference -- and this is what makes Duplicity a lesser movie -- is that the barbs they trade are for fairly low stakes: they are for our enjoyment and not so that the characters come to a better understanding of each other.

Which, I should add, is clearly intentional. Duplicity is not meant to be a comedy of remarriage. It is a sparkling romance, a nimble comedy, a delicious send-up of the corporate world and a fairly tense thriller (the next-to-last scene had me at the edge of my seat), all at the same time. All this means that you may not quite get your fill of Clive and Julia (I certainly didn't). But no matter: every actor in Duplicity is brilliantly funny (and someone please give the deadpan Paul Giamatti an award too!).

All in all, Duplicity is a wonderful movie, better, in my mind, than Gilroy's last (although Michael Clayton was pretty good too). I am not sure how Clive Owen does what he does, how he manages to be competent, and goofy and besotted with Roberts, all at the same time. And while it may not be fair to say that he is the reason the movie works so well -- it is definitely an ensemble piece, and Gilroy's script and the editing are all fabulous -- I will say this: I wish he'd gotten to do Bond. Daniel Craig has certainly re-invented Bond but he's taken all the fun out of it: it's now all deadly serious. Perhaps only Clive Owen could have made Bond more menacing and more fun. Sigh.

Duplicity is smashing fun!

I saw Clive Owen-Julia Roberts starrer Duplicity tonight: the most enjoyable romp I've had this year at the movies. I'll have more to say about it later but let's just say that I've added Julia and Clive to my list of romantic leads who had that mysterious thing called chemistry.

Here it is, just in case:

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen in Duplicity.

Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge.

Kristin Scott-Thomas and Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient.

Ione Skye and John Cussack in Say Anything.

Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story.

Rachel Macadams and Owen Wilson in The Wedding Crashers.

Kate Winslet and Joachim Phoenix in Quills.

Isla Fisher and Ryan Reynolds in last year's Definitely, Maybe.

Wow

This has got to be the most outlandish news item I've read in a while. The most remarkable graf meanwhile has to be this:

The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities. It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.

And this:

Still going strong, the operation continues to invade and monitor more than a dozen new computers a week, the researchers said in their report, “Tracking ‘GhostNet’: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.” They said they had found no evidence that United States government offices had been infiltrated, although a NATO computer was monitored by the spies for half a day and computers of the Indian Embassy in Washington were infiltrated.

I wonder what the Indian Embassy's response is going to be.

The Chinese response, meanwhile, is short and swift:

A spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York dismissed the idea that China was involved. “These are old stories and they are nonsense,” the spokesman, Wenqi Gao, said. “The Chinese government is opposed to and strictly forbids any cybercrime.”

Also don't forget to check out the accompanying photograph of the Toronto researchers, dressed up as if they were taking part in a photo shoot for a Robert Ludlum novel:

Amazon gives in

Sad, sad, sad day indeed.

Good movies coming out this weekend

A. O. Scott says Duplicity is "superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time." Yay.

And David Edelstein says "Paul Rudd and Jason Segel redeem the bro-comedy in the hilariously inverted I Love You, Man." So what should I go watch this weekend?

On the other hand Christopher Orr hints that he found Duplicity "fairly disappointing" (his review doesn't appear until tomorrow).

Oh - and here's a profile of Tony Gilroy in the New Yorker (director of Duplicity and before that -- Michael Clayton).

Question

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this question -- but hell, I need to ask somebody and I might as well ask it here.

I suddenly started receiving weekly issues of Time Out New York -- turns out someone had deemed me eligible for a free subscription. But the issue wasn't addressed to me. Sure - it had my correct address on it but the name was a mixture, let's just say that the first name wasn't mine.

But anyway. I moved 3 weeks ago and like a good citizen updated my address at the post office, which then immediately started delivering my magazines to my new place. Today I finally looked at the 3 issues of Time Out that had piled up and decided to take pity on the PO; I would update my address at Time Out. So I went to the website and clicked on "Subscriber Services", put in my subscriber number -- and what do I see? My new address was right there! Where do these guys get the data from? (I have updated my address at the few essential services I do need: my banks, amazon.com, etc so clearly its from one of those sources.)

But still -- isn't it strange that a magazine I didn't even subscribe to, that I started receiving out of the blue and which even spells my name wrongly, has a perfect information repository in place wherein they even update my address automatically? Whereas the magazine(s) I do subscribe to -- ha, now that's a whole new story.

Still - any guesses? What's Time Out's secret? Conspiracy theories welcome.