Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field

Edited by Antonio Giustozzi
(Columbia University Press, 318 pp., $40)
 

My Life with the Taliban
By Abdul Salam Zaeef

Edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
(Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95)

The northern California coast tends to get smothered with fog during the summer—it just sits there and won't go away. (I'm pretty sure I complained about it constantly when I lived in San Francisco.) But now it turns out that the fog has actually been dwindling over the decades, which could spell bad news for the region's redwood trees:

When the New York Times published an article about how roughly 50 percent of same-sex marriages and relationships in the San Francisco area are “open marriages” in which both partners consent to each other having sex with other people, I assumed it would cause a stir and that I’d be motivated to write a response. Oddly, though, the article seemed to generate little attention.

This is the opening shot of The Picture--my new, biweekly column. I’m not planning to restrict myself to the visual arts here, although they will certainly be a central concern. I want to range more widely than I have in the past, writing about the interlocking worlds of books and pictures and culture that are my lifeblood, my passion. I may describe a forgotten novel that I picked up in a secondhand bookstore. Or salute the life and work of a friend who’s not around anymore. From time to time, I'll dedicate a column to a painting that's excited me in a museum in Milwaukee or San Francisco. But I may also want to say something about a movie or praise an actor's performance. I’m certainly going to discuss the perilous state of our print media world. And comment on any other aspect of the cultural universe that annoys the hell out of me. I hope that The Picture will become a chronicle of one critic’s works and days.

Has everybody forgotten that the arts are recession proof? Yes, of course, revenues shrink, contributions dry up, and expenses continue to rise. Those are the problems that numbers crunchers are put on earth to deal with. But the arts—the play of the imagination, the need for this parallel universe with its dream logic and its moral reverberations—are not affected by shifts in the housing market or the Dow. The value of a painting has never been established at auction. The power of a novel has never been determined by the advance the author happened to receive or by the number of copies that eventually sold. The greatness of a theatrical production has nothing to do with how many people attend. Dancers who can barely make their rent go on stage and give opulent performances. Poets, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper, erect imperishable kingdoms. And there are millionaires who chose to live with the barebones beauty of a Mondrian or a Morandi.

So the White House has finally announced the full list of where that $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail is going. Here are the two big, headline-grabbing projects:

The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer. Tablets have been kicking around for a decade, but consumers have always shunned them. And for good reason: They’ve been nerdy-looking smudge-magnets, limited by their cumbersome shape and their lack of a keyboard. Tablets were a solution to a problem no one had.

Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

By Morris Dickstein

(W.W. Norton, 598 pp., $29.95)

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits

By Linda Gordon

(W.W. Norton, 536 pp., $35)

American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945

By Gavin Jones

(Princeton University Press, 248 pp., $38.50)

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a story of 1926, at the height of the economic boom and his own creative powers. “They are different from you and me.” Rich people “possess and enjoy early,” he explained, which makes them cynical and haughty. “Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” The passage is best known not for its psychological insight, but for Ernest Hemingway’s withering rejoinder. Yes, the rich are different, he conceded: “They have more money.” As with so many of their recorded exchanges, Hemingway is supposed to have come out on top. We are meant to feel that Fitzgerald, in his usual romantic way, believed that the rich really were better, and that he needed Hemingway’s bracing realism to bring him back to earth.

One aspect of climate change that's already affecting people in various parts of the world is the slow but steady rise in sea level (via YaleE360):

Anthony Wright is executive director of Health Access California, the statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition. He blogs daily at the Health Access Weblog and is a regular contributor to the Treatment. 

While vacationing in Hawaii, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh had to visit a hospital for chest pains. At a press conference talking about his stay, he seemed to take a dig at efforts to reform the health care system, saying he was availed of "the best health care the world has to offer." Limbaugh continued,

Based on what happened here to me, I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy.

But, as Ben Armbruster at ThinkProgress and Paul Abrams at the Huffington Post note, Hawaii's health care system is distinct from the rest of the country, in that they passed a version of health reform decades ago, in 1974. The Hawaii Pre-Paid Health Care Act includes a requirement for employers to provide health coverage to their workers. As you may know, a similar requirement on large employers is a key part of the reform now pending in Congress.

And the employer requirement seems, by and large, to have succeeded. It has increased coverage--just under 8 percent of the state's population is uninsured, second only to Massachusetts--and access to care. At the same time, Hawaii still has some of the lowest health care costs in the nation, despite its high cost of living and without an apparent decrease in quality--as Limbaugh himself discovered

But there are other lessons from Hawaii beyond Limbaugh's visit and unintended endorsement of reform.

Are regional college education rates a stay against metro unemployment in bad times? It sure seems like it. Just take a look at the varied metropolitan area unemployment rates reported last week by the Metro Program’s quarterly MetroMonitor and its companion Mountain Monitor, the inaugural edition of which begins coverage of recession and recovery conditions in the metropolitan areas of the six-state Intermountain West. In that document, we noticed that the Mountain region’s third-quarter unemployment rates seemed to have a lot to do with metros’ college education levels, but we didn’t make too big a deal of it. Here, we thought we would belabor the point a bit more and ask why it’s so.

First, we’ll just note that others like Ed Glaeser have noted this connection before, and observe further that it’s hardly surprising that skills might explain metropolitan unemployment rates during the Great Recession given the huge and longstanding employment gap between skilled and unskilled workers at all other times.

Still, it really is striking to survey the extreme variation in unemployment rates revealed by the  MetroMonitor and MountainMonitor maps and connect it to local education levels. Nationally, highly educated metros like Washington DC, Bridgeport, Madison, and Des Moines (with BA attainment rates of 47.3, 42.7, 40.5, and 32.5 percent respectively) have much lower unemployment rates  than less educated metros like McAllen, Stockton, and Lakeland-Winter Haven (with BA attainment rates of 14.8, 16.8, and 17.7 percent, respectively), and this is not just because of regional or even state characteristics. Within the same state, there are still large and significant differences between well- and poorly-educated metros. For example, San Francisco, San Jose, and Austin are doing considerably better than their intra-state peers like Riverside, Bakersfield, and McAllen.

Yesterday’s release of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index has economists—and probably the Obama administration—on edge. The reason: an apparent softening of demand in October, which translated into weak home price growth across the 20 markets that the index tracks. That followed stronger, more widespread price growth in the summer months. The news has stoked fears of a “double dip” in house prices and the resulting havoc it might wreak in the mortgage market.

Like the economy itself, though, what you make of U.S. home prices depends on where you look. The latest Case-Shiller data portray an eclectic collection of metropolitan housing markets, experiencing divergent trends in recent months. The 20 metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller seem to break down into five types:

Consistent recovery. The three big coastal California metro areas—San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, along with Phoenix and Detroit, posted price gains in October, following at least three consecutive months of price growth. Prices in San Francisco were up a considerable 12 percent from their trough in April 2009.

WASHINGTON--Punditry in the nation's capital has its own rhythms, and one common practice involves almost everyone beating up on the same politician at the same time.

Such assaults are rarely about ideology, though I have found that liberals or Democrats are often the object of these sustained attacks, perhaps because journalists are overly sensitive to charges of liberal bias. There's nothing like hitting a Democrat hard to "prove" impartiality.

Sarah Palin isn’t the only person cashing in on her ill-fated bid for the vice-presidency. A whole slew of authors, fashion designers, movie producers, pornographers, cartoonists, and opticians are riding the Palin gravy train. So I was not surprised when a press release landed in my inbox plugging what seemed to be the latest category of Palin profiteer: Academics.

The University of Alaska Southeast is now touting one of their political science professors, Clive Thomas, as a one-stop Sarah Palin expert. He has been hitting the speaking circuit, with recent stops ranging from Utah to Brazil, and upcoming gigs in San Francisco and Chicago. His talks, according to the university, touch on numerous aspects of the "Palin Phenomenon," including "the enigmatic fascination with Palin, the contrast between those who like her and those who do not, and what she tells us about American politics." He also "introduces audiences to 'Alaska in myth and reality' including some Alaska political traits-populism, anti-tax and anti-government, especially anti-federal government and how Palin fits in Alaska." At least happy customer, Oregon State Political Science Chair Bill Lunch, reports: "I will now watch her future career moves with an insight I didn't have before this lecture." Is Thomas the world's first professional Palinologist?

Not if he has anything to do with it. “I study Sarah Palin by default,” says the affable, British-accented professor who has been teaching for nearly three decades. Despite the apparent publicity-mongering of his university, Thomas, who has a Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics and has been awarded four Fulbright fellowships, seems to be standing in the limelight very reluctantly. He explains to me, with a sigh, that while he has written several books on Alaska politics and has taught the subject for decades, he actually specializes in Latin America. (His recent trip to Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile was for research, not just lecturing.) And--surprise, surprise--he seems to be just as sick of Palin as we are.

A new recycling idea is slowly catching on in restaurants and cities around the United States—the "zero waste" movement. The concept's simple enough: Produce less, avoid plastics and packaging that aren't biodegradable, recycle and compost what you can. With food waste making up some 13 percent of the junk that gets tossed in landfills, composting especially is becoming popular: Seattle has been offering residents separate that can be picked up for compost, and San Francisco has just made sorting mandatory.

I had a friend visiting me this weekend who had fervently backed Barack Obama for President (against the “devil-woman” Hillary), but who now thinks Obama has betrayed his followers – most recently by agreeing to disastrous compromises in the health insurance bill. We argued the point on Sunday morning, while reading reports of the passage of the House bill.

As if we needed more reminding, the country has a huge gap between costs required for transportation needs and the funding sources to pay for them. The shutdown of the San Francisco Bay Bridge last week due to faulty repairs earlier this year at least had the miraculous silver lining that there were no deaths from falling structural steel onto the crowded road way.

The Washington Post reported Friday that the conversion of the Tyson’s Corner--the country’s largest suburban-based commercial center with 46 million square feet of traffic-strangled office and retail--into a 100 million square foot walkable urban place will cost $15 billion in transportation improvements. That is a huge sum even for extremely wealthy Fairfax County, equaling over $40,000 per household to be spent in only 1.2 percent of the county’s land area.

Where will that money come from? That is the question as we debate the reauthorization and hoped-for reform of the federal transportation bill. This is particularly vexing since the Highway Trust Fund is on life-support, being bailed out twice in the last two years as gas tax revenues continue to fall.

The Washington Post article went down the line of usual suspects; increased gas taxes, shift to a vehicle miles driven tax, tax increment financing ,and ended with the private property owners taxing themselves.

Joe Mathews is the Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

In the days ahead, you may hear all kinds of explanations for why San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the race for governor. Poor fundraising. Poor standing the polls. Internal problems in his campaign. But none of them were decisive. Newsom had only one problem, but it was a problem to which there simply is no solution.

That problem is the name Brown.

California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.

Jose Lopez at the San Francisco Fed takes a look at the Fed's power to influence a wide variety of market interest rates and finds that, despite improving economic conditions, the relationship between the fed funds rate (the rate the Fed controls) and other rates is still broken.

The following chart from Lopez's analysis shows the pre- and post-crisis movements of the inflation-adjusted fed funds rate (blue line) and an indicator for 13 different market rates (red line):

To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?

Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).