Matthew Yglesias

A New Hope

So...as you may have noticed I write a bunch of blogs. Well, those days are coming to an end. When I'm done guest-hosting for Josh at Talking Points Memo this week, I won't be rejoining TPM Café (no hard feelings, it's just what I thought would be the best situation for me). Similarly, at the end of this week I'm going on leave from The American Prospect to work on another project. I'll keep writing my weekly column for TAP Online and depending on how things shake out I may do some pieces for the print magazine, but I won't be contributing to Tapped for a while.

Simultaneously, this blog is shutting down as of now. No more posts here. Instead, I'm relaunching MatthewYglesias.com (new design by Tom Lee) and come Labor Day Weekend that will be, for the immediate future at least, the sole blogospheric outlet of yours truly. You'll see the political content of my "professional" blogs plus the sports, culture, and miscellany you find here. Hopefully, some posts will combine those interests. Dividing the blogs up had a kind of professional and business rationale, but I think it hurts the quality of the editorial product which is best served up as a unified entity. It'll also make the work more manageable for me. The new site's RSS feed is here. If, for some reason, you only come for the basketblogging (soon to be joined by some footballblogging) you can find the sports-only feed here. If, more plausibly, you find the sport stuff annoying, you can find a non-sports feed here.

Hm...

What's this?

Time to Reconsider

I'm not sure if you guys know who Richard Quest is, but suffice it to say that based on my rather small level of watching CNN International while traveling he's far and away the most annoying television news personality on the planet. Or else, if you're Catherine, he's "totally and completely adorable and hilarious."

I don't think we can be friends anymore.

Staying Over

A letter-writer to Slate explains that her teenage son has his first girlfriend and that they've forbidden him from having the girl spend the night at their house. Only problem -- the girl's parents let him stay over at their house. What to do?

Some parents feel that as long as behavior they don't entirely approve of is taking place under their roof—underage drinking, taping sessions of Girls Gone Wild—they are in control of it. But these two teenagers are minors, and you have an obligation to set the standards for your son's behavior. He makes quite a case for his maturity: He throws a tantrum, then pouts. As for you, what's the point of having old-fashioned values if you're not going to enforce them? You need to have a talk with the girl's parents. Don't be either defensive or self-righteous; just say your son is not allowed to sleep at their house. Yes, your son will be angry, but what you are doing is not just for now, but for when he is a parent and can draw on the lessons you taught him about standing firm.

But what about the parents' substantive views here? I understand that there position is fairly widespread, though it certainly wasn't current among the parents at the den of immorality where I went to high school. And what's the logic of the anti-sleepover position? Teen sex is fine, but seen post-coital cuddling must be stopped! Or, at a minimum, curtailed. Why would you think that? What, exactly, is the problem here?

Race War

Is this for real? Survivor to segregate teams by race. This reminds me of my longstanding awesome-but-never-gonna-happen plan to eliminate the lame Eastern Conference versus Western Conference concept in the NBA All-Star Game. Instead, you field the Black Team and the Other Team. Sure, it sounds a little absurd, but Yao Ming, Dirk Nowitzki, Andrei Kirlenko, Manu Ginobili, and Steve Nash is a solid starting squad for Team Other.

Sadly, this is a kind of offensive concept and probably can't be brought off the ground. But since there are no Americans on my proposed non-black starting lineup, and I don't think any foreigners would crack the all-black starting five you could reconfigure this around the less-inflammatory USA versus World concept. Does the switch make a big difference? I think it only matters at point guard where white American Kirk Hinrich is a backup on a non-black team but not an all-American team, and black Frenchman Tony Parker is a backup on an all-foreign team but not an all-black team.

Why, Yes, I am An Asshole

Over at Tapped, Ben Adler misses the point about this Washington Post article. The whole concept that there's some kind of "big three" universities in the United States -- Harvard, Yale, and Princeton is a foolish Tiger construct. There's Harvard, there's an Ivy League, and there's a Harvard-Yale rivalry. Number one US News ranking or not, Princeton simply has nothing to do with it and these efforts to pull away from the Brown-Columbia-Dartmouth-Cornell-Penn pack are, frankly, unseemly.

Yes, yes, it's rude but that's the way it is. Copious research indicate that college choice is, in fact, unimportant for life outcomes leads to the conclusion that the only relevant considerations are (a) cost, (b) weather, (c) snob factor and that New Jersey school just can't compare to Harvard and Yale in category (c).

What's Not Wrong With Deadwood

This post starts out as some wrongheaded Deadwood-bashing and then veers off into total madness:

Part of the problem for me, I'm sure, is just the setting. In fact, I think setting accounts for a lot of the differences in taste in TV shows that we've been talking about lately. No matter how awesome Buffy might be, the hocus-pocus and fight scenes just bore me. Ditto Battlestar Galactica, which I've watched enough to know is really well done, but which bores me because spaceships and laser guns bore me.

For one thing, there are no laser guns in Battlestar. What's more, spaceships are a great setting for a show because they're just like submarines (especially when not equipped with lasers) and submarines are the best setting imaginable. Plus, who finds fighting boring? In comments we learn that this would be the very same person who says Deadwood's "dialogue seems unremarkable to me." I can imagine someone who doesn't enjoy the dialogue, but unremarkable? Was he watching?

I should say that, personally, I'm growing increasingly disgruntled with Deadwood. I love the (obviously remarkable) dialogue. The setting is interesting. There's good themes, good characters, solid acting, all to the good. But at the end of the day the lowbrow consideration of story is important. Season Three seems to be running with a decent one, but it suffers from egregious pacing problems and lots and lots of disconnected stuff. I know from experience debating the relative merits of the later Sopranos seasons that not everyone agrees with me about this, but I think the sort of lassitude we're seeing in Deadwood 3 is the characteristic flaw of the better (i.e., HBO-style, if not literally on HBO) programs. The shows get made, at least in part, because the writers will able to pitch a coherent, well-done story arc along with various other good qualities. Once that initial arc is done, the show's other merits are still with it, but the deployment of a solid story arc needs to be done all over again. And it's hard to do. The temptation becomes to slow down the action and basically stretch your plotting out as far as it will go and just lean on well-executed more-or-less random scenes to fill out your screen time. This generates decent results when done by good writers and actors, but it's still unsatisfying in a way that tighter stuff isn't.

Away We Go...

Jacqueline Massey Paisley Passey suggests:

I realize that some of you will find this post depressing because you’ll realize that you don’t qualify as a high quality man and thus won’t be able to get a high quality woman. You have a few options: [...]

2. Look in the developing world. If you’re literate with a home computer and an internet connection you are very wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Citizenship or legal permanent residency in a rich country makes you more attractive to women in poorer countries. Your value on the dating market is thus much higher there.

Cryptic Ned observes:

I thought her second suggestion was a good reminder. It's amazing that virtually anyone who's struggling in America could move to a town in the developing world and instantly have wealth and power w.r.t. everyone around him, and yet nobody does. Where's our conquering, settler spirit?

Some people, however, actually do do this:

Years ago there was a series of long posts on the Thorn Tree by an ex-pat in Alma Ata. He was amazing because he was completely upfront about being a despicable person. He was entirely aware that he was living up to the worst of himself; he’d resigned himself to the trap of living well in a third world country. He hated Alma Ata, thought it was an ugly soviet concrete city. He hated Russians and Kazakhs alike for being racist peasant gangsters. He was bored shitless at his do-nothing job for some aid agency. He despised himself for whoring, couldn’t remember the last time he’d fucked a girl who liked him or could have refused his relative wealth and power.

And yet, he knew he would stay as long as he could. He couldn’t resist the advantage he got just for being American; it was all too easy. In Alma Ata, he was important enough to include in the nightly drinking with the big boys. He was fucking more and more beautiful women than he thought he could even approach at home. He could live cheap and have a maid and a driver and eat well (except that he hated Kazakh food). He had no demands on him, no civic life in a land where he was an irrelevant stranger, no family to demand his attention, not even the daily chores of living.

Food for thought? Sounds like a bad dude. Surely this is the main theme of one of the many well-known vaguely contemporary novels I haven't read. If so, let me know, I think I'd like to read that one.

Going Native

A friend's in vising from out of town this weekend and he, rather thoughtfully, brought me some proper New York-style bagels with the hard crusts like you can't get here in DC. Naturally enough, I decided to cut and toast one this morning for breakfast. Less naturally, I totally forgot how to operate on a bagel of that consistency and sliced one of the fingers on my left hand pretty nicely. Apparently you can take the NYC out of the boy.

Snakes On a Plane

It was surprisingly warm-hearted, you know? Saw it in a sold-out theater with a pretty giant crew as outlined here. Everyone was having a good time. The dude who played Eddie Kim struck me as turning in a notably worse performance than everyone else in the film which was a little curious since it's not like the standards were notably high to begin with.

Sports Borders

The New York Times tackles an interesting question I've always wondered about -- where in Connecticut is the Sox/Yankees border? And, of course, there's a generalized form of the question for all sports boundary zones.

Dream On

The New York Sun's Martin Johnson sure is an optimist: "As presently constructed, the Knicks should vie for the final playoff seed this year and maybe next." That's absurd. The only thing the Knicks are in contention for is a three-way battle with Atlanta and Charlotte for last place. If anything, New York is worse situated than ever since Orlando and Toronto both might be in a position to take non-trivial steps forward depending on how their respective European big men turn out. If, however, Iverson, Pierce, Arenas, and Redd all suffer catastrophic injuries, Bargnani is a bust, Darko can't add any stamina, then I could imagine the Knicks being in the playoffs. Maybe.

Mine -- All Mine!

House Hunt 2006 just came to a rather unexpected -- and unexpectedly happy -- conclusion after much struggle and turmoil. Ironically enough, we're actually winding up in the "Dupont Circle" house whose actual location is 14th and Florida. The good news is that I actually much prefer that location -- 14th and Florida is pretty ideal for me. The house is also quite large and very affordable considering its size and location. The bad news is that it has really ugly floors. I'm probably in the bottom five percentile of the population in terms of inclination to care about floor aesthetics, but these are truly ugly floors. But the situation is otherwise ideal and I'm not opposed to spending much of September shopping for rugs (or am I? never actually shopped for a rug before).

Rise of the (Sexy) Machines

Glenn Reynolds may have whack views on foreign policy, but I like his taste in offbeat links:

Feminist science-fiction writer Amy Thomson, author of robot-comes-of-age novel Virtual Girl, suggests that the fembot myth is attractive to men because it deals with “a woman you create and control.” But tech journalist Daniel Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, argues that fictional fembots have hardly been portrayed as controllable—in fact, he claims, they’re often presented as the most dangerous robots of all, because feelings of attraction to them could leave their victims vulnerable to attack. “A sexy robot that’s aggressive could be a wolf in rubberized skin,” he says.

In all seriousness, though, while Wilson is correct on the narrow issue at hand here, the theme he points too of the uniquely dangerous nature of the robotic woman is also an antifeminist trope. Women's sexuality needs to be tightly regulated by men or the state because a woman fully in control of herself could, say, trick a man into revealing the secrets that lead to the near-destruction of the human race, as seen in Battlestar Galactica.

Football Season . . . Hey!

Watched the end of the Raiders-Vikings game and whaddaya know . . . football season is (sort of) here, ending the horrifying Summer Sports Nightmare brought about by the end of the World Cup and the way the Basketball World Championships appear to have been scheduled so as to make them impossible to watch in North America.

I'm ashamed to admit, however, that when it comes to the NFL I'm something of a sports bigamist. In NBA terms, my relocation to Washington, DC conveniently coincided with the Knicks stumbling from "disappointing" to Godawful and the Wizards rising from Godawful to "hey, this team is pretty good!" status so I somewhat shamefully shifted allegiances. I think, though, that this is an ultimately defensible move since I more-or-less plan to keep living in DC forever and in this day-and-age I don't think it makes sense to ask people to support the team in the town they grew up in to the exclusion of the town where they actually live. Giants-Redskins dual loyalties, however, is totally untenable. If they played in different conferences, it might work. But it's the same division. Last year, they managed to both make the playoffs and then not face each other in the postseason, which was a pretty ideal outcome from a bigamist perspective.

But I can't shake it. I hope Clinton Portis recovers smoothly, but I also hope Eli Manning keeps his shit together under pressure....

Interns?...Happy Hour?...Networking?

Part XIV of The Washington Post two hundred and seventeed part series, "Trend Reporting for Dummies" informs us of the shocking news that there are a lot of interns in Washington, DC over the summer and that they frequently go to happy hours hoping to network. Left unanswered: Are there wingmen present at these happy hours?

'Melo Out

I think Carmelo Anthony is overrated. Indeed, the only doubt I have whatsoever about making that assessment is that he seems to me to be one of those guys on the verge of developing a reputation for being overrated, at which point you cease to be overrated. But I have to admit, he seems to be doing really well in these international games alongside a bunch of fantastic players.

Even weirder, Antawn Jamison seems to be outplaying Gilbert Arenas.

The Descent

The premise for this film, some hot chicks go spelunking and run into trouble, sounds stupid and, frankly, it is. But it's also the most genuinely terrifying movie I've seen in a good long while. I'm not ashamed to admit that at one point I screamed like a little girl. I will say that the "scary" element was enhanced by the fact that I went into it knowing literally nothing about the movie except that it involved a cave -- not event that it was a horror movie. But contingent atmospheric elements aside, I'm reasonably confident that it would hold up under any circumstances -- they just do a really good job of pacing the story and unnerving you from the get-go with a brilliantly executed opening scene. I'm certainly never going to go into a cave.

Life Imitates The Wire

Reader C.M. wonder if these alleged terrorists aren't taking inspiration from The Wire.

Shooters

Greg Easterbrook complains:

Equally vexing is constant media and cultural use of the word "shooter" for someone who commits murder using a firearm. Press reports regularly refer to the person holding the gun during a murder as "the shooter," which almost sounds like some kind of skilled trade. The person holding the gun during a murder is "the murderer." This came to a head in Arizona this summer when a pair of fiends prowling Phoenix was dubbed the Serial Shooter, and so referred to even by Phoenix police. A murderer isn't a "shooter," he's a murderer.

I think there's a bit of an error here. Press reports talk about "shooters" because after a shooting cops talk about shooters. In part, that's because any time there's a shooting the cops are going to want to find the shooter, whether or not the shooting was a murder. In part, it's because it's not always clear in the immediate aftermath of a shooting whether or not it was a murder (it could be unclear exactly what happened, or the victim might be in critical condition) but you're going to want to find the shooter anyway. In part, it's because you can have a situation where more than one person participated in a murder (by, say, conducting an armed robbery) and are all legally guilty of murder, but only one person ("the shooter") actually shot and killed anyone.

How So?

I'm glad the Wizards signed DeShawn Stevenson, too, but this idea doesn't make sense to me: "He will provide the Wizards with a defender off the bench at the shooting guard position, allowing Antonio Daniels to play more minutes as the backup point guard." How will that allow Antonio Daniels to play more minutes as the backup point guard? Does that mean the virtue of signing Stevenson is that it will let the Wizards give fewer minutes to Arenas, they're best player? That doesn't make much sense.

Lies and Real Estate

The one advantage I have in my not-terribly-successful efforts to find a new place to live is that I'm now pretty darn familiar with the District of Columbia. Thus, let me suggest to any house-hunters out there that they be on guard against bizarre Craigslist accounts of which neighborhoods are where. A house on 14th and Florida, for is example, is not in Dupont Circle. Nor is an apartment on Vermont Avenue north of V Strete in Logan Circle. Just saying. The "Logan East" concept is also getting used in increasingly abusive ways.

U! S! A!

My understanding is that Team USA breaks the exhibition game against China wide open down the road, but the first quarter, currently playing on my DVR, was really tight. The Chinese offense is oddly effective considering that the team doesn't do anything that looks like it would work or appear have any players capable of creating their own shots.

I also find it frightening and, frankly, a little sad to see Arenas trying to act like a real point guard and a good team player instead of unleashing the madness of Gilbertology on the poor Chi-coms (sure, sure, it's the right thing to do, but still).

The Wire

DVDs of Season Three of The Wire will be shipping tomorrow and Season Four should premiere on September 10. If you haven't seen the show, you should. And I would seriously suggest that you start at the beginning and watch Season One on DVD rather than just trying to plunge in, though personally I started by watching Season Three on air and then backtracked. It is, simply put, the best show in the history of television.

The baffling ad campaign they're running in the DC Metro manages to leave this completely unclear, but at its core the show is about police and drug dealers battling for control over the streets of Baltimore, though it also expands to cover elements of the local political scene, union corruption, the FBI's shifting post-9/11 priorities, and a variety of other things. It's an extremely demanding show offering no flashbacks and very little exposition despite a sprawling cast of characters and very complicated, years-long plot arcs but the rewards to people who watch closely and pay attention are incredibly large. I don't know anybody who's sat down to watch it and not been incredibly impressed.

Little Miss Sunshine

I bunch of people told me I had to go see this one, so I did, Friday night. And I loved it. Then, last night my friend who didn't care for it was trying to convince me the whole thing was fake, contrived, artificial, etc. And, in retrospect, I guess it was. But it seemed great while I was watching it. And that's what counts, right? Or does it? I can't really decide.

Sleater-Kinney

Great show last night -- you can hear it on NPR's webcast if you're so inclined. I think Marisa Meltzer's piece on the band in Slate is very good as well. I'll proclaim One Beat my favorite S-K album.

Schedule

I understand why they do it this way, but I think it's a bit unfortunate that the entire NBA national television schedule gets set in advance, especially since there are such huge disparities in terms of which teams get on television. The revamped Raptors roster at least might turn out to be really good and they'll be viewable nationwide . . . exactly never. It's also interesting that ESPN seems interested in the Sixers and the Wizards (eight times each) but TNT is totally not (zero and one respectively).

Best. Show. Ever.

Sleater-Kinney at the 9:30 tonight, that is. Or at least it would have been awesome had the show not been canceled by order of the Fire Marshall due to the transformers outside the club catching fire. Allegedly it shall be rescheduled.

Jeffries Again

It seems that the Wizards are inclined to match New York's offer for Jared Jeffries, but that J.J. wants to go to New York. That seems odd. Sometimes guys want to leave a better team to go to a worse one in order to get promoted to starter, but Jeffries is already starting for the Wizards. Nor is Jeffries from New York or the sort of guy who stands to reap tons of endorsement money from moving to the Big Apple or something. According to his agent, "Jared wants to play for Isiah" which seems like a joke, but is apparently how he feels.

Could it be that Isiah Thomas has promised to give Jeffries a bigger role in the offense?

"Hamsterdam"

This goes a bit against my New Criticism leanings, but this interview with George Pelecanos sheds some light on the 'message' of The Wire:

Washington, D.C.: The whole "Hamsterdam" storyline in the 3rd season of The Wire was fascinating, with the scene from the "Back Burners" episode where Bubbles visits Hamsterdam at night being especially terrifying. I found it truly believable that the police are under so much pressure from above that they would concoct a scheme like this. How did you guys come up with that idea?

George Pelecanos: It started with a big What If question. What if we legalized drugs in a small portion of the inner city? What would happen? Because many people feel that this is the answer. It was surprising, even to us, what we came up with. The result was not comforting or pretty.

From a purely dramatic perspective, I'm very glad they did it that way rather than turning the experiment into a shining success didactic brief for drug legalization.