Matthew Yglesias

"But"

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on Adam Smith: "Perhaps Smith, too, was divided - after all, this was a man who once devoted two full pages of a treatise on language to the word
'but'." This is where I must protest that "but" is an interesting word. Note, for example, that one ordinarily thinks of "but" and "and" as contrasting words rather than synonyms. But the truth conditions for sentences including "but" and sentences including "and" are the same. "John went to the store and forgot the milk" is true if and only if "john went to the store" is true and "john forgot the milk" is true. "John went to the store but forgot the milk" is true if and only if "john went to the store" is true and "john forgot the milk" is true. You can try this at home and check for yourself -- for all X and all Y, "X and Y" is true if "X" is true and "Y" is true, and "X but Y" is true under the exact same circumstances.

Nevertheless, in many cases switching between "but" and "and" seems to alter the meaning of a sentence substantially and there are many situations where removing an "and" and inserting a "but" would seem clearly inappropriate. "John and Paul went to the store" is fine, but "John but Paul went to the store" isn't. "John went to the store but Paul did, too," however, is a perfectly legit thing to say. And in all cases the point is that this is true if and only if both dudes went to the store.

Anyways, I don't want to write a whole two pages on this, but "but" is interesting and there's nothing wrong with writing about it.

Containing Gilbertology

Arresting him works.

Vienna

Great town, though I believe I once paid $7 for a Coke Lite at a stand near the Schloss Schonbrunn. I meant to speak, however, of the open source RSS reader that I downloaded yesterday, which is pretty cool too. I'm now officially a convert from NetNewsWire.

Guy Lit

Julian Sanchez critiques a critique of the genre. I dunno. I watched the High Fidelity movie and liked it so I got the High Fidelity book which I thought was pretty good but not as good as the movie. Like most American men, I read very little fiction. I'm heading to the beach this weekend, so I thought I could use a novel and I guess I liked High Fidelity enough that I bought How to Be Good. Unless I'm confused and different guys wrote those books, but I think that's right.

At any rate, if I were going to write a "guy lit" novel I think the model for my protagonist would have to be . . . Julian Sanchez (as Sawicky used to put it, "My friend Julian Sanchez, bon vivant and man-about-town).

Seriously, though, critiquing whole genres seems to be silly. For any given genre, the median exemplar of the genre is going to be bad. Everyone has a few genres such that they like the median exemplar of the genre, but only a few standout works really "stand out" and have genuine aesthetic merit.

Library Thing

Do I need more social network websites? Probably not, I tend to start these things up, then get distracted, and never really use them. But I like trying new things. So next on the agenda: LibraryThing.

Via Goodspeed.

Small Ball

Everyone's talking "small ball" with regard to Phoenix-Dallas, but it's worth pointing out that the very different Detroit Pistons arguably fit the mold as well. Ben Wallace is listed at 6'9" -- very short for a center. Barely taller than Boris Diaw and shorter than Tim Thomas and significantly smaller than Nowitzki. Of course, Wallace is a muscle player in a way that Dirk and Thomas clearly aren't, but he is small and we saw at times during the Cleveland series that even though we're used to thinking of him as an interior guy he can guard a taller perimeter player like King James. Rasheed Wallace is actually the tall guy on Detroit, but not really a "big man" in the traditional sense.

The Little Guy

Despite not being convinced that Dennis Rodman was better than Michael Jordan, the comparative hype over LeBron James' postseason performance over Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki serves as a reminder that there really is a bias in intuitive judgments in favor of high-scoring perimeter players versus guys who do other things better. James played very, very well but when you look at the numbers his somewhat higher scoring came at the expense of a considerably lower TS% and higher turnover ratio. Meanwhile, James is a very good rebounder for his size but he's still way worse than the big men.

Fundamentally, perimeter play looks more impressive since it involves all that driving and leaping, but this can get a little misleading at times. In particular, defensive rebounding almost never looks impressive when you're doing it right, but everyone knows that if you surrender tons of offensive boards you're going to lose the game.

Trinidad

Not the country, which I hear is nice. It's also the name of a neighborhood in Northeast DC. Went out there Saturday night with some friends, hoping to try and regain our hipster cred, but it turned out to be curiously un-hip, though in a rather different way from U Street's "not hip anymore" flavor.

At any rate, I find all my friends' ongoing transformations into self-loathing yuppies rather amusing. It's not that I'm any better, but unlike your average twentysomething urban young professional, I was actually raised this way. My parents are the rare yuppies who never grew up and moved to the suburbs, just kept on living on University Place which was edgy when they moved there, I guess.

Dennis Rodman

Malcolm Gladwell reviews the aforementioned book, The Wages of Wins. It's an interesting piece, though at this point I think all serious basketball fans already know that statheads think Allen Iverson is overrated. If you want to see a truly controversial claim, check out this 1999 paper by one of the book's authors looking at the 1997-1998 MVP race. The leading candidates were Michael Jordan and Karl Malone. They conclude that Malone had a superior season, worth 18.83 wins as opposed to Jordan's 16.44 wins. Fair enough.

They say Jordan actually only had the sixth-best season. Numbers four and five were David Robinson and Tim Duncan respectively. Then it gets a bit wild. Number three on the list is Jayson Williams! And number one on the list . . . better than Jordan, Barkley, Robinson, and even Malone -- Dennis Rodman whose 20.79 wins make him far and away the league's top player in the 97-98 season.

Matt's Advice to Cleveland...

... is to try and trade Ilgauskas. He's an okay player, but also a pretty classic case of non-complementary skills. With LeBron on your team, there's no reason to try and run your offense through Big Z. Varejao's almost certainly a worse player in the abstract, but he's a good fit for the team -- provides what they genuinely need from a big man and can run the floor okay. They have essentially identical plus/minus scores. Cleveland needs spot-up shooting much more than it needs low-post offense, and you could probably procure outside shooting in exchange for him.

UPDATE: Or another way of looking at it -- trade whomever or other to move up high enough in the draft to get JJ Redick, who I don't think is even projected to go especially high. Most teams, I think, couldn't afford to play someone who's that short and can't really run the point, but the Cavs can.

Caps and Caps

Tyler Cowen posts about a new book that looks very interesting -- a blog. Here's a post arguing that salary caps don't increase competitive balance. I don't believe that -- yet -- but people are starting to convince me. Maybe the book will. One thing the post reminds me of, though, is that we should distinguish between team caps and individual caps. The NBA has both and the latter almost certainly undermines competitive balance rather than enhancing it.

Some guys are worth more than a max salary. Some guys are worth a lot more than a max salary. If you get one of those guys, you wind up with a huge bargain that has nothing to do with your GM's bargain-hunting nose. Drafting LeBron James is valuable not just because he's a fantastic player but because the salary rules mean he'll always be underpaid. If you're Denver, I think it's pretty clear that you have to offer Carmelo Anthony a max extension. But Anthony's obviously not as good as James, even though they'll make the same salary. Absent the individual cap, Denver could compensate for the fact that Anthony's worse than James by having more money to spend on teammates and it would all even out in the end and the team who made the smarter moves would wind up being better. But as it stands, Cleveland's going to be able to lock a big advantage into place.

Local Color

I've been meaning to take some pictures of this forever, since given the pace of change in the neighborhood the building's all-but-certain to be demolished soon in favor of a condo. There's this vacant commercial space at the corner of 9th and Rhode Island with some really funny French graffiti type stuff on it -- mainly funny for being in French I suppose, but funny nonetheless -- and now it's here for all to see on Flickr.

Am I Israeli?

I'm certainly Jewish. But Phoebe Maltz tries once again to convince me I'm also Israeli, even though nobody in my family's lived there for over a thousand years:

While few American or other Diaspora Jews have actual, ancestral roots in the modern state of Israel, all have such roots in a Jewish nation as perceived by those of earlier generations. I've written about this before, but to reiterate: even if your grandparents lived in Eastern Europe and wouldn't have known what to make of zatar or tehina, the nation they were a part of is now based in a specific geographic locale, and that is Israel.

This seems question-begging. The number of Jewish people still living in the traditional Eastern European heartland is disputed, but the State Department says there are 600,000 to a million in Russia plus, presumably, more in Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, etc. Be that as it may, why isn't the geographical basis of the "Jewish nation" right here in North America where I live? There are slightly more Jews in North America than there are in Israel and significantly more Ashkenazim.

We're Doomed

A little Gilbertology is heading for the All-NBA Third Team. This bodes ill for the Wizards. The man needs fuel -- snubs. The last thing he needs is the recognition he deserves. Motivational qualities aside, it seems to me that over the past three or four months Gilbert has achieved the annoying status of being a player who's universally described as underrated. Ah for the sweet days of the All-Star snub . . . is mighty Detroit actually going to go down to defeat in six games just like lowly Washington? Gut says the Pistons manage to get their shit together and pull it out.

DC Don't Dance

DC rock shows are famously un-dancey. But why? I saw this plausible theory at Charles' place:

The authority conundrum was quite graphically illustrated in D.C. during the early to mid-nineties when Fugazi started offering frat-guys their money back when mosh pits were created during their sets. Audience-members started seeing the disdain that violently thrashing about could elicit from an authoritative source (in this case, Ian). As time progressed, not only was violently moshing frowned upon, but so was dancing and later, any movement whatsoever-- to the point now at which the correct standard posture for a D.C. rock show is arms-folded, eyes straight ahead (I can't take credit for this thesis; this idea was first set forth in an excellent yet now-defunct online zine called the "Finley Breeze").

Could be. There certainly is a lot of lock-in associated with this sort of thing. I'm not an especially dancey person, such that it doesn't really bother me that people don't shake it at shows here. But I'm not rabidly opposed to dancing either. If that's what people were doing, I would do it. But it's not, so I don't, even though I don't have any particular Fugazi-derived views on the subject.

Morons

Christ. Sam Cassell gets an eight second violation, then Tim Thomas forgets to call a time out. Obviously, it's a big pressure situation and everyone makes mistakes but aren't these guys supposed to be highly trained professionals?

Assists

Just saw this NBA house ad celebrating "The Assist." Doesn't it seem, though, that they really ought to record something more like "points assisted?" You know, so you'd get extra credit for assisting a three pointer or a three point play and so good passes that led to free throws would get some recognition. What's more, making the switch would make it way easier to get triple-doubles, which would be fun.

Getting the Band Back Together

Ugh. Somebody needs to get the world's female-vocalists-in-bands-I-like to stop recording crappy solo projects. Jenny Lewis, Neko Case, now I'm listening to Amy Milan's desperately mediocre album. And I hear Emily Haines is working on one too. This is terrible.

Apple Store Needed

The alleged "case for Arlington" is mighty unpersuasive. Nevertheless, as the author notes there is one very convincing argument for a trip to the closest suburb -- they have an Apple Store. Indeed, they have two Apple Stores -- one in Clarendon and one in Pentagon City while we Districters have none. Apple really needs to resolve this situation, especially in light of their new ad campaign where the boring suit-wearing PC guy, no doubt an Arlington resident, faces off against a cool hipster Apple dude who no doubt hangs out on U Street while complaining about how much cooler it was back in Austin/NYC/wherever.

The other thing that brings me out to ol' virginny is my aunt and uncle and my two cousins who live out there, no doubt because of the deplorable state of the DC public school system. Arguably, improvements in that regard are more pressing than acquiring an Apple Store. But city officials need to spend more time catering to my needs. In fact, we have a mayor's race in town this fall and since I know nothing about local politics I hereby pledge to support whichever candidate promising to bring Apple to the nation's capital.

Weird

In an alternate reality, I would be an overwhelmingly music-focused blogger and I think the resulting product would be . . . exactly like this. In particular, this post about how Pitchfork is evil for making too few people show up to Rainer Maria shows. Similarly, in that alternate reality I would totally go see Metric thee nights in a row.

Good News

Way down at the bottom here they say the CW will keep showing Veronica Mars. That's via Scott Lemieux who's seriously underestimating Deadwood.

My Alma Mater

Ah, Dalton, so many memories:

Jappy girl #1: So like, I couldn't believe what happened to [Erica], but like, I think she'll be ok. I mean, she's gonna marry some guy who went to Penn instead of some guy who went to Princeton, and she'll have a country house in South Hampton instead of like, East Hampton, but I think she'll be ok.

Jappy girl #2: Oh yeah, I think she can handle it.

Jappy girl #1: Poor thing.

--The Dalton School

My family summers in Brooklin, Maine so I was always fuzzy on which Hampton was which and what the difference was.

Set Muzak to Stun!

I really can't approve of my friend Tom's decision to go get Lasiked; it's a serious affront to America's myopic community. On the plus side, however, the process has already generated several amusing anecdotes so that's some consolation. It seems fairly probably that the technology for conducting this sort of surgery will improve in efficacy and drop in cost quickly enough that nearsightedness will be banished from the developed world at least. In the interim, though, there's going to be this weird transition period where I and millions of other cranky old men (and women) will insist on not getting the surgery and this will be an idiosyncratic characteristic of people born in the second millenium.

"Gold Lion" Video

This hadn't occurred to me before, but YouTube really is an ideal distribution mechanism for indie rock videos.

In other news, I'm generally not a fan of broad assertions of copyright, but if someone were to insist that this shit be taken down I wouldn't be displeased.

Important Analysis of Local Issues

What to think about the Central Union Mission relocation debate? To recap -- there's this big, grungy homeless shelter on 14th and R creating a kind of one-block zone of blight in what's otherwise a bustling commercial strip extending south from U Street. They want to sell their space and relocate to a new position on more peripheral Georgia Avenue. People living in the vicinity of the proposed new location don't want it to go there. A classic tale of NIMBY. Since I happen to live equidistant from the two locations, however, my backyard concerns cancel out and, therefore, I think the decision should be left up to me.

Purely egocentrically, I'd like Central Union to stay where it is. 14th Street is about as gentrified as I want it to be. Arguably, the recent closing down of the awesomely weird African-American Pentacostalist church with its fire-and-brimstone bombast on the storefront in favor of some kind of new loft condo development shows that things have gone too far. Georgia Avenue, by contrast, is less-than-ideally gentrified. Enabling further development on 14th Street in favor of retarding the development of Georgia Avenue is bad for me.

But in principled terms, I favor relocation. A homeless shelter is clearly an inefficient use of the 14th Street location. The money raised by selling that facility and buying a new space in a not-so-far-away but cheaper location will let Central Union improve its facilities. What's more, the District as a whole has a problem with under-intensive development between height restrictions and things like this shelter. Basically, desirable locations are not packing nearly as much stuff in as they might. This both makes the stuff that is in desirable locations more expensive than it ought to be and is leading to big price run-ups in locations that are, at the end of the day, still pretty marginal. We'll all benefit, in the long run, by letting space be allocated efficiently according to demand with facilities that derive no special benefit from facing 14th Street moving elsewhere, and those do derive said benefits moving in to replace them.

Top Scorers

Henry Abbott, writing about basketball statistics says, "Getting players who get a lot of points and rebounds does little to build you a winning basketball team. Can you imagine getting all the highest scorers and rebounders on one team? Hello failed Team USA of the last few years." I see what he's getting at, but this seems like a serious overstatement. If you really got the top scorer at every position you'd have a starting lineup of Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and Allen Iverson. It's doubtful that that's the optimal five man lineup but considering the extreme simplicity of the rule ("pick the top scorer at each position") you're looking at a pretty stellar team. Certainly it would win basketball games. But how good would the team be? Your reserves are Shaq, Elton Brand, Paul Pierce, Dwyane Wade, and Gilbert Arenas. This is a solid squad, but it's been assembled pretty thoughtlessly. Say you had to take ten guys who aren't on the list. Who do you pick? Do they win?

This gets a little tough. In principle, your big advantage is that you get to take defense into account. But since the scoring team has so many top-flight scorers, they're going to be able to run isolation plays for whoever's being guarded by your weak link. I think the way to go is to beef up on interior defense and accept that you're not going to be able to rely on one-on-one "d" to protect you. Ben Wallace, Kevin Garnett, and Andrei Kirlenko. The maybe Ray Allen and Steve Nash as your guards. That'll be a terrible defensive backcourt but hopefully the frontcourt guys can cover.

Time Warp

Got home after a disorienting mid-evening trudge through shockingly heavy rain and flipped on the old television. Ah, the sweet comforts of the NBA playoffs. Dallas versus San Antonio -- great matchup. Only Dallas seems to have a surprisingly clear upper hand. Even more shockingly, the Spurs are suffering from all the same problems as hobbled them in Game 2. And stranger, the announcers don't even seem to see the similarity. And the games are very similar. So similar, in fact, that when I look into it a little, I'm just . . . watching Game 2 again on re-run which would also explain "Game 3's" otherwise puzzling location in what looks to be the AT&T Center.

Good Start

Wow! I figured missing the first 1/8th of the Heat-Jersey game couldn't possibly involve missing anything crucial. In fact, Miami built a 25-4 lead. What happened? That's terrible.

Well, go Nets! The Heat are loathsome and I think New Jersey will give Detroit a more competitive conference final.

Best Book Blurb Ever

"Although, as a socialist, I find it difficult to accept that roads should be privatized, as a transport professional I believe that Street Smart is essential reading for those of us struggling with the problems of efficient transportation"

--Dave Wetzel, Vice Chair, Transport for London

See here.

500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born

All I actually do all day at work is rant and rave about the evils of baby boomers and old music. Shockingly, I had no idea that months ago Blender magazine published a list made just for me -- "The 500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born" that, conveniently, assumes "you" were born in 1980, which is just about right. Even better, I really like almost all of these songs. At the intersection of mixing genres and ordinal lists, however, lies madness.

Veronica Mars

Catherine sums the finale up. One point of disagreement is that it seems to me that Beaver is gay. I totally approve of Veronica and Logan getting back together, though I understand this is controversial. The new "CW" or whatever better renew the show. Rent season one on DVD if you haven't seen it.

Get This Party Started

Whoa -- "boozy fermenting ground for hormonal wonkocracy" and nobody invited me. It seems to me that The New York Observer is developing an unhealthy obsession with Ross Douthat who, while a good guy, is hardly the critical news story of the present day. I'm also not sure Chloe Schama, who's really tall, resembles Claire Danes all that much.

Lobster

So on Big Love tonight Bill said he ordered two dozen live lobsters from Maine and also alleged that this cost two thousand dollars. But right here you can buy twenty lobsters for $375.95 -- where's the HBO quality control? I also don't understand why you would bother cooking all those lobsters in a giant pit in your backyard. You're boiling them, so it's not as if the charcoal is going to provide a different flavor from what you might get by using a stove. And, as the owner of three adjacent houses, surely he has enough stove capacity to cook that many.

Round Two

With the exceptions of Pistons-Cavs, these series are remarkably hard to predict.

If you made me pick, I'd take the Clippers, Nets, and Spurs but I wouldn't be shocked to see all three teams lose either.

Crazy II

Incidentally, my contention that Harvard is in the business of admitting crazy people isn't wholly lacking in non-anecdotal support. Check out Malcolm Gladwell's review of The Chosen:

At the same time that Harvard was constructing its byzantine admissions system, Hunter College Elementary School, in New York, required simply that applicants take an exam, and if they scored in the top fifty they got in. It's hard to imagine a more objective and transparent procedure.

But what did Hunter achieve with that best-students model? In the nineteen-eighties, a handful of educational researchers surveyed the students who attended the elementary school between 1948 and 1960. This was a group with an average I.Q. of 157—three and a half standard deviations above the mean—who had been given what, by any measure, was one of the finest classroom experiences in the world. As graduates, though, they weren't nearly as distinguished as they were expected to be. "Although most of our study participants are successful and fairly content with their lives and accomplishments," the authors conclude, "there are no superstars . . . and only one or two familiar names." The researchers spend a great deal of time trying to figure out why Hunter graduates are so disappointing, and end up sounding very much like Wilbur Bender. Being a smart child isn't a terribly good predictor of success in later life, they conclude. "Non-intellective" factors—like motivation and social skills—probably matter more. Perhaps, the study suggests, "after noting the sacrifices involved in trying for national or world-class leadership in a field, H.C.E.S. graduates decided that the intelligent thing to do was to choose relatively happy and successful lives." It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn't want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn't enough.

Forgetting academics, think of basketball. We all assume that LeBron James will keep working really hard at his game and improve, becoming one of the game's all time greats. But, really, why should he? He's plenty good right now, and even if he doesn't work hard and doesn't improve he'll make shitloads of money. True superstars, in any field, are going to have an irrationally high level of commitment to what they're doing. So if you're deliberately trying to make yourself the alma mater of tomorrow's superstars, you're going to wind up with a lot of pretty unbalanced individuals. Talent matters less than people think, hard work really does pay off, and the world will be dominated by people too crazy to see that they've crossed the point where more effort isn't worthwhile.

Crazy

Discussion hereabouts about being a "crazy magnet" and why sex with crazy people is better. I'm not even sure that's true, but it sort of sounds like selection bias. Basically, why are spending time with this crazy person? Because of the awesome sex.

In my experience, though, far and away the strongest correlate of craziness is having been admitted to Harvard College. Since leaving the asylum, the proportion of people I socialize with who seem reasonably well-adjusted has skyrocketed. And, no, it's not just that folks got older and more mature, since I still know a reasonable number of alums and the incidence of craziness is off-the-charts higher among that set than the alternatives. I think this indicates that I myself am probably crazy (and perhaps really good in bed?); I don't feel crazy, though I guess if you're crazy you probably don't know it. All that said, lots of my favorite people are crazy but there is something pleasingly grounding about knowing a non-trivial number of non-nutters. For a while there near the end of school when I was spending time exclusively with the crazy/Harvard set (first 2.5 years had a girlfriend elsewhere) I really started to loose my grip on things and started thinking it would be a good idea to, for example, invade Iraq.

The Agony of Defeat

Man. Never witnessed an emotionally devastating loss live and in person before. It's kind of . . . devastating. Gilbert's shot at the end of regulation: so happy! Gilbert misses two crucial free throws in a row in overtime: so nervous! Cavs' final shot goes in: so very sad! Making things worse, once I got down to the Gallery Place Metro station there was a 15 minute wait for the Green Line train providing plenty of opportunity for disappointed fans to stew in our misery.

I'm now torn between a desire to root against Detroit, since having overwhelming favorites win sucks, and a desire to see Cleveland crushed.

Learn the Rules

Why oh why didn't the Wizards call a timeout with 0.9 left? Sure, scoring under those circumstances isn't terribly likely, but it's not impossible.

Charge!

It's kind of hard to beat LeBron and the James Gang when the refs decide not to call fouls on him . . . we already lost one game thanks to a no-call travel. I mean, I appreciate that the whole future of the league rides on King James seeing postseason success, but can't they arrange for someone else to be the designated loser.

UPDATE: Okay . . . just gave us a close one there and now LBJ has four. Fair enough; apologies for the whining.

UPDATE II: Jeff van Gundy says there should be no fouling out. I think that makes some sense. Still, it's good to have some disincentive to be fouling constantly. Maybe your sixth, seventh, eight, etc. fouls could result in three shots instead of two. Then it'd be up to the coach to weight the balance of risks.

The Death of EmoGirl

As commenters have noted, I seem to have fallen for one of them interweb hoaxes.

Lakers

An awful lot of alleged sexual assaults going on with this team, eh? I'm torn as to what to root for in the Lakers-Suns series. I don't like LA. I do like Phoenix. And even though Nash's MVP was ridiculous, like all decent people I'd like to see the Nash/D'Antoni style of play prosper. On the other hand, everyone's looking forward to the possibility of a Clippers-Lakers round two showdown, which would be kind of awsome.

Birds Are Dying!

Emo girl -- hilarious. YouTube rules.

United 93

I saw a local newscaster last night trying to make this out to be a huge hit movie, but the numbers she was citing pretty clearly didn't support that. Nevertheless, a pretty enjoyable film. It really made me want to . . . go invade Iraq for no reason. No, no, it didn't; and there was some genuinely moving, emotionally powerful as the passengers realize that the end is nigh. It's virtually unheard of to have something actually affecting in your basic thriller, but that suits the genre well.

The problem is that the film included what was, to me, a really jarring perspective switch. Most of the way through the movie, it's a kind of multi-part narrative, with one thread following the United 93 hijackers, one thread following FAA HQ, one thread following NORAD's east coast HQ, one thread following Boston air traffic control, and a minor thread following air traffic control at one of the NYC airports. I liked this film. It was basically The 9-11 Commission Report: The Movie and it's about how faced with a confusing situation the basic elements of our government's alleged system for protecting the population were paralyzed and basically useless. Then that ends and you get this other movie that takes a very narrow, tunnel-vision perspective of the passengers on United 93. This is also a good movie -- one that forces you to adopt the narrow epistemic profile of passengers on a hijacked plane.

But they're really different movies. The intention here, I take it, was to draw the contrasts between the combination of information overload and paralysis at NORAD/FAA and the information deficit and decisive action on the plane. But to do that properly, you really need to weave the alternate storylines together rather than, as United 93 did, kind of stitch them one after the other.

Cutting Down

I think cutting down on television-watching in favor of "more productive and potentially lucrative side projects" is a dangerous and wrongheaded scheme. What I'm currently looking for are ways, consistent with my current TV-watching regimen, to get more diligent about watching DVDs rapidly after Netflix delivers them. The ideal thing to do would be to cut down on the amount of time I spent "hanging out" with "my friends." Tragically, I don't think "sorry, I need to watch TV" is an adequate counterproposal to an offer to go do things and spend time with people.