Matthew Yglesias

Passion Revisited

I went to see The Passion of the Christ when it came out, and it seemed pretty anti-semitic to me. It also seems to me that evaluating the film based, in part, on anti-semitic things Mel Gibson said long after its release is a fallacy. I'm just old-school like this, but it seems to me that the work is the work and the author is the author and the one thing has very little to do with the other -- if we discovered tomorrow that The Birth of a Nation was actually directed by a talented African-American looking to make some cash by making a film that D.W. Griffith could put his name on that wouldn't alter the fact that it's a racist movie.

What's more, anti-semitic or otherwise, it's still a good film in my opinion just as various other (usually significantly older) literary or dramatic works have recognizable quality notwithstanding the existence of discernable objectionable views. The Great Gatsby, after all, is not without its anti-semitic moments.

Miami Vice

The good news is that this movie contains one of the greatest gun battles I've ever seen on film. The bad news is that you need to watch almost the entire thing to get to the gun battle. Treating essentially the same subject as Michael Bay's underrated masterpiece Bad Boys II, Michael Mann manages to offer the audience considerably less in the "awesome shit" department but doesn't really add anything. The movie is shot and paced like it's a semi-serious thriller or something but there's actually nothing serious about it. Several characters -- including Jamie Foxx as "the black guy" -- are utterly zero-dimensional and certainly nobody gets a second dimension. The key love story is totally weird and non-credible, and it just doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that a film whose basic storyline involves a handful of local cops taking down a vast international drug cartel with a couple weeks' work is going to be fundamentally unserious (nothing wrong with that; again, see Bad Boys II) and shouldn't bother pretending otherwise. [spoilers]

No doubt, however, someone will someday decide that this was a brilliant deconstruction of the buddie movie concept. A white cop partnered with a black cop neither of whom seem to interact with each other in any way or have any sort of thoughts or feelings about the other guy. Indeed, the white cop could even pressure the black cop at one point into making a controversial decision (black cop backs his partner up) that winds up getting the black cop's girlfriend kidnapped, tortured, and badly burned by a bomb and -- or so it seems -- neither cop seems to react in any way to this awkward situation other than by redoubling their resolve to get the bad guys. It's pretty sweet. I have a more intense relationships with random people I run into a lot on the elevator.

Housing

If the housing market is really on the way down, then why am I having such a damn hard time finding a new place to live? Seriously. I need to move because the dude who owns the house I live in had an adjustable rate mortgage that, in light of recent interest rate developments, he no longer thinks it's worth holding on to. So he's selling. And presumably he's not the only one in that boat. This is the sort of thing that should drive home prices down, and according to reporting I've seen that is what's happening in the District. But as I look around for a new home, rents seem way up from where they were 18 months ago.

Payday for J.J.

Having been something of a Jared Jeffries detractor for a while now, I'm glad to see that genius general manager Isaiah Thomas seems to think he's pretty damn good.

The Strange Case of Allen Iverson

Iverson is a guy who a lot of people think is overrated. That, in turn, implies that a lot of people rate him quite highly. I wonder, though, if this is really the case. After all, no general managers anywhere seem interested in trading much of anything for him. The irony is that as his reputation has declined he seems to have . . . gotten better if you look at the stats. Indeed, Iverson seems to have had his two best seasons ever in 2005 and 2006.

Sir Charles Speaks

""I was a Republican until they lost their minds," says Barkley, who's at least claiming to be considering a run for governor of Alabama. I think Democrats should try harder to recruit more sports stars to run for office . . . given the demographics of pro sports it's got to lean in that direction, and I think athletes tend to have a lot of the qualities that voters (mostly wrongly, but that's a different issue) look for in a politician.

We

I'm not nearly the fan of Orwell's 1984 that, seemingly, everyone is these days. Consequently, for a while I thought it might be fun to claim that Yevgeny Zemyatin's We, of which there's apparently a new translation out was actually the superior book. That's almost certainly false now that I think about it, though it's still the case that We gets relatively little recognition for pioneering most of the key themes that then pop up in the better-executed 1984. From a political point of view, the most interesting thing about We is actually its very early date -- 1921. When you read it, it seems like a parable about Stalinism but it's actually too early for that and serves as a reminder that the more discerning Soviet minds had an inkling of where things were headed even in the early days.

Banks to Phoenix

I guess this happened a few days ago, but signing Marcus Banks seems like a good move for Phoenix. As usual, the local paper seems to be overstating the case, but a somewhat-below-average player off the bench is something that could help a thin team like the Suns and Banks is young enough and has been showing improvement so you've got to think he has some upside.

Playlists

Julian Sanchez writes about how the iTunes playlist concept is leading to the decline of album-listening: "I was struck with the realization that I own entire albums, mostly ones I've gotten in the last few years, from which I basically only know three or four songs--in a few cases more like one or two." People have various feelings about this, but everyone knows where he's coming from. What I think often goes missing in this conversation is an appropriate appreciation of the contingency of the album concept.

In the domain of popular music, the song suggests itself as an obvious, natural unit of consumption. What's more, since songs are short, the idea of bundling them into larger units also suggests itself as obvious. This works on two levels. On the one hand, from the pure point-of-view of commerce, it makes sense to bundle the product. On the other hand, there's an aesthetic idea of a group of songs arranged in a specific order for a specific purpose. The actual convention of the album represents a merging of these concepts. Given the technology of the era, the best way to package music was to combine roughly as many songs as would fit on an LP record. This was a purely commerical consideration, but a strong and compelling one. Given that commercial reality, artists would shape aesthetic impulses around that commercial imperative and try to product roughly LP-length series of songs that had some level of aesthetic integrity.

The rise of digital music ought to allow us to decouple these ideas. Under the current order, it makes perfect sense for an artist to envision a more-than-one-song product, intended to be consumed in a block, without that block necessarily containing approximately as much music as can fit on an LP record. This, I think, could be a very positive development. Realistically, it's actually rather rare for a band to release an album wherein the album per se has a ton of aesthetic logic. Relaxing the length constraint would make it easier for bands to construct song-packages ("albums") that served a real aesthetic rationale. Probably my favorite recent album-qua-album is Set Yourself on Fire by Stars. This comes very close to being a well-conceived conceptual and thematic whole. But "He Lied About Death" and "Celebration Guns" (which I love as a song-qua-song) clearly don't fit with the overal scheme, and I'm not sure that "Calendar Girl" does either. Absent the pressure to make albums rather than series of songs of arbitrary length, the band could have done a somewhat-shorter-but-more-reasonable package on the love-and-loss theme and then just released a few more songs that they thought were good but didn't fit the scheme.

Team USA

Gene Wojciechowski writes about the good chemistry between Dwayne Wade and LeBron James, the two young cornerstones of the USA Senior National Team. That's great. The only trouble is that I think it would actually be a mistake to play the two of them at the same time. They're both extremely effective offensive players. You'd be thrilled to get to run your offense through either guy. But on any given play, only one guy can have the ball in his hands. And either Wade or James is certain to face shitloads of double-teams and/or packed zones. So you're going to need guys on the floor who can reliably hit the open outside shots. And neither James nor (especially) Wade is a very good three-point shooter.

From where I sit, you want to build your starting lineup around James. When he's on the floor, the ball is going to be in his hands. Dwight Howard, a dominant rebounder, plays center. You want your other three players to be guys who can shoot well -- probably Shawn Marion, Gilbert Arenas, and Kirk Hinrich. When James needs a rest, that's when Wade enters in the game (in exchange for Arenas or Hinrich) while Joe Johnson comes in at the three. Jamison backs up Marion, and Chris Bosh will probably have to play backup center. That way you'll always have either James or Wade initiating the offense plus three credible outside shooters on the floor.

The temptation, I fear, will be to just play the "best player" at each position without regard to what everyone's actually supposed to be doing.

Arts and Crafts

I just discovered the YouTube page for Arts & Crafts Records home of much excellent Canadian indie rock and music videos one doesn't ordinarily see on television. Here's Stars' "Elevator Love Letter":

Free Agents

Very interesting column by Kevin Pelton on overpaying for free agents. He even mentions me! I was confused, however, by this: "How successful could a team composed solely of players on their rookie contracts really be? Barring a LeBron James- or Dwyane Wade-esque young superstar, it's hard to see such a team really contending." Well, sure, but this just seems like another way of saying that teams in contention usually include a superstar-caliber player.

Songaila

I don't really understand why the Wizards signed Darius Songaila. He's a bad defender and a poor rebounder on a team that needs to get better at defense and rebounding. I also don't really see where he's supposed to go in the rotation. I guess the idea is that he backs up Jamison and maybe that they give Jamison a bit more rest than he got playing 40 mpg last season.

50-50

This kind of sentiment from Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg is becoming all-too-common: "In the old days (like, two or three years ago) that was OK, because the Pistons won with defense. But you can't win with defense in today's NBA. The new officiating guidelines — no hand-checking, no use of the forearm along the baseline, no breathing on Dwyane Wade — have given offenses the edge."

That makes no sense. Basketball is half defense and half offense. That's a straightforward consequence of the fact that both keeps get virtually the exact same number of possessions in a given basketball game. Rule changes can make defense easier (i.e., lower league average offensive efficiency) or harder (i.e., raise it) but nothing short of a truly dramatic overhaul could alter the relative importance of offense and defense. In addition to making defense more difficult, one assumes the recent rule re-interpretation has changed which elements of defense are most important -- i.e., guarding low-post scorers matters less than it used to compared to other things -- but defense is exactly as important as it used to be.

It would also be worth Pistons' fans time to actually understand what happened with the Pistons' team defense over the past several seasons. In 2004, they were second-best in terms of efficiency. In 2005, they were third-best. In 2006, they slipped to sixth-best. The fact that the rule changes made defense as a whole harder, in other words, shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that Detroit's defense actually got worse relative to the rest of the league.

Do-Over!

MoDo:

One 24-year-old Washington reporter agreed that "redos" of previous partners can keep your number below the slut threshold, defined by two of her male friends as "less than 20." She thinks she is "chaste’" with a number of six, but admits she sometimes subtracts one or two when telling a guy her romantic history. She said she kept dating Mr. Six after she’d lost interest simply because she didn’t want to up the number to Mr. Seven.

One 25-year-old writer in D.C. said his ideal girl’s number is one or two fewer than his. When he had "the numbers talk" with one date, she gave him an answer that he found both satisfactory and sexy: "Enough to know what I’m doing."

Adrienne wants to know: "Who are these masked writers? Do I know them?" I think I know two different 24-year-old female journalists who've made observations along these lines to me, though one of them may be 25. More intriguing, to me, is Dowd's reference to her "classy 26-year-old girlfriend." Do people really have buddies across that kind of age gap?

What Price Jared Jeffries

Washington Times: "the number of teams with available cap space has dried up considerably, leaving undesirable destinations such as Atlanta (with its ownership quagmire), Charlotte and Toronto as the only teams with much room under the $53 million cap. Most teams Jeffries would prefer to play for have only the mid-level exception available."

Does that mean someone might seriously consider paying Jeffries more than the mid-level if they had the cap space? I find that astounding.

Bigger Than The Sound

This mons on MySpace trend seems to be a serious national crisis requiring immediate action. And speaking of disturbing internet trends, there's something both cool and horrifying about the DIY "Cheated Hearts" video the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs put together:

At any rate, not to be too boring about a music video, but this is actually a really good illustration of the main points of Yochai Benkler's book.

"Sing" -- But Why?

I'm not a huge Dresden Dolls fan, so I keep forgetting about this but it really seems noteworthy. Some lyrics from their "Sing":

Sing cause its obvious sing for the astronauts sing
Sing for the president sing for the terrorists sing
Sing for the soccer team sing for the janjaweed sing
Sing for the kid with the phone who refuses to sing

Sing for the janjaweed -- wtf? The only sense I can make of this at all is that it's a vicious anti-soccer smear, landing the team in the middle of a Bush-terrorist-janjaweed sandwich. But, seriously, that's demented.

Contracts

Oy...all kinds of technical problems with TypePad yesterday. So how about these Class of 2003 contract extensions? Do we think these guys are really going to move around in three or four years? It seems to me that all the same CBA-mandated incentives to resign with the team you're already on will all be in place, but I'm also not sure I understand all the relevant cap/contract/CBA rules. Or, rather, I'm quite sure I don't understand them.

Detroit

Allrighty, what else to say. I understand Detroit's reluctance to offer Ben Wallace enough to outbid the Bulls, but I'm not sure the NBA universe has quite come to grips with the fact that, Wallace-less, we're looking at a burned-out shell of a basketball team in Motor City. Look at Big Ben's on/off numbers. Last year, the team went from 100.9 points per 100 possessions with him on the floor to 111.5 points per 100. That's a giant difference. But of course, Ben's a non-factor on offense, right? Well, with him on the floor they scored 112.9 per 100 and with him on the pine they got 109.3 per 100. The team lost what was probably their best player, and neither got anything in return nor by failing to resign him wound up under the cap and able to make a marquee free agent signing of their own.

Under the circumstances, I think the idea that you can hold things together by signing Nazr Mohammed and "narrow[ing] their search for another wing scorer to three candidates -- Cleveland's Flip Murray, and former Pistons Chucky Atkins and Tony Delk" is kind of insane.

Joe Dumars has a solid track-record, but I think this is a situation when you need to consider blowing up the team, tanking the season, and rebuilding for the future. Rasheed Wallace and Antonio McDyess have some real value now, but they're old and it won't hold up. Why not try to move them for younger guys and picks? I don't see any feasible set of moves that's going to get the current core into contention and while Billups and Hamilton aren't old, they aren't young players either.

There Goes The Neighborhood

Our friendly neighborhood crack house was demolished on Friday. Photos here.

Mais Pourquoi?!?

This French broadcast of le headbut is much more expressive and cool than the one I saw this afternoon on ESPN.

Now for the question du jour so to speak. Why do sports commentators always have to be such goody two-shoes about this stuff? Obviously, if you're broadcasting the game as a France partisan you're going to want to bring across some shock and horror. Here's your legendary player, the leader of the team, getting himself kicked out of the game for no apparently good reason. And if you're broadcasting as an Italy partisan you need shock and outrage. That scum, how could he do that! But from the perspective of an American broadcaster, who knows perfectly well that his audience is composed overwhelmingly of people intrigued by the World Cup spectacle but also sort of bored by soccer, would it be so unthinkable to point out that the head but in question was sort of . . . totally awesome.

The headbut to the chest is a move I've never seen anyone even attempt on film or in life. And Zidane executed it perfectly, apparently knocking the wind right out of his foe with a well-placed blow. What's more, it's so totally perfect that a star soccer player would be skilled at that sort of move, while a veteran of America's hand-using sports would need to throw a punch to knock someone down.

And yes, yes, yes it's sad to see a great career end on an ethical low note. But what did the other guy say to him? This doesn't seem properly reported anywhere.

Brighter Than A Thousand Suns

Okay, I can't leave the basketblogging alone. Aside from the Bulls, I think the most intriguing offseason situation concerns the Phoenix Suns. They let Tim Thomas and Eddie House walk. They sold their draft picks for cash. They've signed nobody and seem disinclined to pursue trades. And they're clearly playing for a championship. They're counting on returning Steve Nash, Shawn Marion, Leandro Barbosa, Raja Bell, and Boris Diaw from the team we saw in the playoffs plus back-from-injuries Kurt Thomas and Amare Stoudemire to win it for them. Will it work? How will it work?

The first question, obviously, is Amare's recovery. Obviously, I'm not a doctor. And even if I were a doctor, I haven't examined the patient. But I think there's at least some reason for skepticism besides the obvious point that the track record of the microfracture surgery isn't fantastic. This is, roughly, that Amare played way better in the 2004-05 season than he did in 2003-04. His TS% went from .536 to .617 and his turnover ratio went from 13.5 down to 9.4 -- both dramatic changes. This reminds us of two things. One is that even a basically healthy Amare need not necessarily be nearly as awesome as the 2005-vintage Amare was. The other is that in 2005 Amare was really awesome. He was playing at a very high level in the 2004 season (PER 19.8), but the Amare who powered the 2005 Suns was at a much higher level (PER 26.6). Which is all just to say that there's plenty of room for him to come back, and even be very good, but not quite be back.

The other thing is that this will once again be a very, very thin roster. The Suns, who were doing unexpectedly well Amare-less last year, were reallly set adrift when Kurt Thomas got injured. And this despite the fact that Kurt Thomas is hardly the NBA's greatest player. The rotation was just so thin that losing him really crippled the team. Signing Tim Thomas who went on to work unusually hard in a contract-year performance managed to once again steady the ship. But the whole Thomas/Bulls/Suns situation was rather unusual and one can't count on it just happening again.

It seems a little imprudent to stay this thin, especially since we know several of these guys are hardly immune to injury.

Last, lineups. Presumably, the plan is going to be to have Thomas and Stoudemire play alongside each other for some significant amount of time. Indeed, that was the initial plan when Thomas was first aquired and the injury to Amare not yet known. But this struck me at the time as a questionable move. Doing so would leave the team with two non-threats from the perimeter on the floor simultaneously. Obviously, that's a fairly standard NBA situation. But equally obviously, the Suns offense has been uncommonly successful over the past two seasons consistently not doing that. Abandonning that element of a model that's working really well isn't something I would do.

Then again, the obvious analysis is that last year's Suns team was very good, Amare is fantastic, and so next year's team should be really, really strong. I could totally see that being right. Especially since Phoenix has now been badly underestimated two years in a row, I certainly wouldn't bet against them.

Take a Look, It's in a Book

Then, piggybacking on the much-discussed NEA study "Reading at Risk," he talked about the overall decline of reading in America, and the link between being a frequent reader and - well, all sorts of good things, from joining bowling leagues to doing volunteer work. (An interesting factoid, which suggests this reading-civic engagement connection isn't just a corollary of class differences: the poorest readers in America are twice as likely to do volunteer work as the richest non-readers.)

Thus spake Douthat. I wonder, though, if these aren't corollaries of class differences after all. I feel like a high proportion of low-income readers are going to turn out to be graduate students and New Republic researcher-reporters rather than authentic working class sorts. Note that 80 percent of families read no books last year so the sample of "readers" is a pretty small one.

Devout Pump Like A Type HermitListened to it Speak Daily

Someday, we'll have computers that can translate whole web pages within minutes. For now, we have Google Language Tools:

They tell Devout Pump like a type hermit, methodical. Abruzzese of lean, small the Aquila, cinquantacinque years, of stature, a pronounced boldness and glances at them from short-sighted. Who the pedinava observed it punctual, every morning to the 6,30, to exit alone in order to go to buy newspapers in newspaper stand. Who intercepted it on one of its four telephones, cellular and three fixed ones, listened to it speak daily, with hour cadences, a single man Strongly Braschi: Nicolò Pollari.

Original here.

Laura Rozen summarizes here.

My Bulls Confusion

Maybe I'm counting wrong, but don't the Bulls now have too many players? They added two lottery picks, signed a free agent, and traded Tyson Chandler for two guys. That plus last year's returning guys from last year-- Deng, Gordon, Hinrich, Duhon, Nocioni, Songaila, Allen, Harrington, Pargo, and Sweetney -- equals 14. Who's going to play? I never understood what the Bulls rotation was anyway, so perhaps are less confused. I was interested to see this morning that Nocioni, who I'd understood to be their best player, seems to have a negative +/- rating. Obviously that's not the most valuable stat in the world, but you normally don't see that result.

UPDATE: Let me also say that I think the idea that Ben Wallace's value is undercut by the rule changes and the new-school NBA is dead wrong. The upshot of the changes has been an increase in the value of perimeter slashers and a decrease in the value of low-post scorers. Wallace, obviously, isn't a low-post scorer and never was, so that element doesn't reduce his value. Rather, he's a defender. But his defensive value isn't especially his value going man-to-man against post scorers (though he is good at that), rather, he's a tremendous help defender -- great at leaving his man to block shots. He's actually extremely well-suited to the new era.

Cardozo

I watched the fireworks last night from the steps of Cardozo High School which is both near my house and one of the elements of our local Metro Station's improbably long name ("U Street / Cardozo / African-American Civil War Memorial"). I'd always assumed it was "Cardozo" as in Benjamin Cardozo, the first Jewish Supreme Court justice and therefore somewhat incongruous to the actual ethnic balance among the neighborhood schoolkids. According to the allmighty Wikipedia, however, it's actually named after Francis Cardozo, "the first African American to hold an administrative office in South Carolina" and a former Latin teacher at nearby Howard University.

Independence Day

A patriotic cartoon about the life and times of George Washington. This video's "not safe for work" or whatever, but if you're working today your employer hates America.

Big Ben

Chris Broussard thinks signing Ben Wallace was a great move for Chicago. As he observers, "I think the Chicago Bulls will hold teams to 40 points a game this season . . . sans Wallace, the Bulls already had the best defensive team in the league, holding opponents to a league-low .426 shooting percentage. Now, they'll be absolutely stifling." Well, there's the rub. I mean, how good do we think it's possible for the Chicago defense to get? I think this may wind up making less of a difference than is apparent at first glance and that it's simply hard to improve very much defensively beyond where Chicago already was.

The Gender of Crime

Catherine's quoted in this article about running with earphones on which notes that "The RRCA realized this back when the Walkman was the portable music player of choice and approved a guideline in 1991 recommending that headphones be prohibited in races and used with extreme caution when running near traffic and for women running in isolated areas."

Remember the Walkman? I wonder how young you have to be to have never owned one -- I imagine I'm near the cutoff point.

That said, how come women running in isolated areas? Well . . . of course we all know why. But this is still a rather curious social phenomenon. Most street crime victims are men, and women are more likely to be raped by someone they know than by a stranger who happens upon them as they job. Generally speaking, the big crime risk factor from women is husbands, boyfriends, and exes rather than walking or running in seculuded areas. A North Carolina study indicated that 80 percent of murdered women were killed in their homes.

Is Less More?

I suppose I don't know what I'm talking about, but Zachary Roth's premise that the World Cup should be reduced to 16 teams because "[t]t's not until the knockout rounds that the match-ups get good" seems mistaken. He notes the Argentin-Serbia blowout, but that's exceedingly rare. It was the only 6 goal margin in pool play and there were no games with a 5 goal margin. Indeed, one (Ukraine) of the two (the other was Saudi Arabia) teams to lose by four goal margins actually wound up advancing to the quarterfinals. The modal result in pool play was a one goal margin of victory and there were more draws than blowouts of three goals or more. I would say that the merit of soccer's "boring" tendency toward low scores is that it tends to avoid blowouts.

If anything, I would advise FIFA to go in the reverse direction -- expand the tournament to 64 teams and do it March Madness-style as a giant single elimination tournament. That would eliminate the phenomenon of ties, which are lame, and even worse the phenomenon of teams playing for the draw which is super-lame.

Refs

Frank Foer mounts a quasi-defense of world cup officiating, saying he "can't help feeling that Americans derive a large measure of unhealthy schadenfraude from bashing the foreign refs."

We like to believe that our own sports are clean and well-managed, while the rest of the world is inflicted by corruption and abritrary enforcement of the law. Americans suffer such illusions about their own political system, which usually fares pretty badly in Transparency International surveys of global monkey business. Illusions about our own relative purity extend to refereeing. If our referees are so great, why the hell don't they call traveling in the NBA? Why do they arbitrarily call palming? Why does the strike zone shift around so much in MLB?

I think the difference is that, for a variety of reasons, the individual officiating decisions in soccer are much higher stakes than are MLB and NBA calls. There are so few goals scored in a soccer match that if a team scores because of a penalty kick that they shouldn't have been awarded, or if goal is wrongly called back because of a mistaken offsides call, the official has effectively decided the game. Similarly, the penalty for getting a red card is extremely severe. In a basketball game, as long as you assume that officiating errors are good faith errors, one has the sense that it all more-or-less averages out over the course of the game. Soccer doesn't seem to be like that.