Content & Context

This Week:

Wish Lists and reading piles
Places & Culture
Weekly Digest

A GOOD BOOK OR TWO, OR 50

Every night at 8:30, prisoners of the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pennsylvania, are sent to their bunks for three hours of quiet time before lights out at 11:30. Among them is Sam Waskal, the founder of ImClone, sentenced to over seven years for insider trading. And he seems to want to make the most of those three hours.

One week before his sentence began in July, Waskal logged on to Amazon.com and made a Wish List, a registry of books he wanted to read, according to Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker. Her review of his high-minded, 50-item list, which “would put a MacArthur Fellow to shame,” Mead says, is intriguing. Among the volumes in which Waskal will wallow: A History of the Modern World; Einstein: His Life and Times; Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist;Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question; Alexander the Great; Ulysses Annotated; Herodotus’ Histories; two versions of the Peloponnesian War; letters of Friedrich Nietzsche; and several titles on Jewish history.

“Waksal has not indulged himself with the standard books that one has always wanted to get around to reading properly but never had the time for; there is no Proust, no Gibbon, no Clarissa,” Mead says. Still, it may take him more than seven years to polish off the books he did request; at the time of Mead’s writing, 47 of his 50 wishes had been granted (some by well-wishers at a farewell party). Mead notes that Amazon’s recommended add-ons to Waskal’s list (which is now unavailable online) included Delmore Schwartz’s In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

I linked earlier to an item that talked about weblogs as records of a person’s pattern of thought and personal guides to what’s worth reading. In theory, Wish Lists could be too. In practice, they aren’t. For one thing, looking up anyone but a friend is a dubious exercise: a stack of New Age CD’s was entered by a David Broder of Washington D.C., but presumably not by the Washington Post columnist, while it’s hard to see why Anne Lamott would need Typing Tutor 10 (though the town and birthday are correct). (The first choice of some joker who registered as George W. Bush was none other than Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance.) Meanwhile, as the New York Timeswrote last year, Daypop.com’s rankings of the most popular Wish List items are unremarkable: Harry Potter, Michael Moore, and Simpsons DVD’s. In short, most people whose reading lists would be interesting can afford to buy what they want themselves; the Amazon lists will continue to be used mostly for birthdays (including mine).

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

GORLOVO, Russia—In his battle to keep the 6,500-acre cooperative farm he manages from following thousands of other Russian farms into oblivion, Ivan Matantsev has survived economic panic, a killer drought and endless breakdowns of his fleet of 15-year-old tractors. Whether he can survive Galina Belikova is still in doubt. From a coffee-colored cottage nicknamed “the pit,” built on an asphalt lane with no name, Belikova dispenses bottles of rotgut vodka to any of the farm’s 80 workers who can muster 30 rubles. By Matantsev’s reckoning, nearly a third of his workers would gladly give in to the incapacitation offered by Belikova and the other vodka vendors. To counter that danger, the farm’s 53-year-old director says he decided to take drastic action. For the past seven years, he has refused to pay cash salaries to his workers. Instead, they receive scrip that is good for purchases at the farm’s own store, which sells food, toiletries and other staples, but no booze. Some workers are grumbling, but Matantsev says the main purpose is temperance, and his tactics seem to be working. … Matantsev is battling not just for the farm, but for the survival of the village of Gorlovo. Full story

NEW YORK—As America has long suspected, no one here can drive. Lawyers, doctors, day laborers, actors, psychotherapists: New York City has more able-bodied, non-licensed, car-phobic adults than anywhere in the United States. … More than half of the [Washington D.C.]’s residents are licensed drivers. In this city, approximately 25 percent of the inhabitants possess a driver’s license. (How many of that select club actually can drive is another matter.) Caroline Hwang, 33, a novelist and editor, is one of New York’s carless millions. She lives in Manhattan and walks, hails cabs, uses her subway card. She packs her beach towel and takes the Long Island Rail Road to the Atlantic Ocean beaches and bums a ride when friends insist on one of those bucolic weddings north of the Bronx. As a teenager in Wisconsin she had a license, but that seems so yesterday. Full story

DIGEST

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• As of last week’s two-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, several assumptions about the events of that day were well known—but not true, says David Plotz in Slate. No, Zacarias Moussaoui was probably not the “20th hijacker.” No, we don’t know for sure that the hijackers used box cutters to seize the cockpits. No, the use of airplanes as weapons was not an unknown concept to the U.S. government (though it may have been legitimately unexpected). Plotz clears up these and other myths of September 11. Full story

• In the six years since it was reacquired by China, Hong Kong has taken comfort in three beliefs, writes University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Waldron in Commentary. One is that Beijing is more pragmatic than ideological, and thus permissive of some self-rule; two, that this was a sign of less restrictive policies to come; and three, that this guarded good will would translate to Taiwan. “These comfortable assumptions look to have been completely overturned by the mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in July,” Waldron writes. Now, both China and Hong Kong need less ambiguous policies, and neither can ignore the “people power factor” the demonstrations displayed. Full story

• The coming Muslim majority in so-called Roman Europe—by which Arabs are predicted to dominate Spain and replace Italians altogether—has been overhyped, writes analyst Michael Vlahos at Tech Central Station. Nonetheless, demographic shifts will bring a more sizable Muslim minority in Spain and Italy, which, “from 2010 to 2050, could alter the nature of European civilization,” Vlahos writes. His piece is repetitive, but it introduces a crucial theme. Although most commentators speculate that Arabs will either come to dominate European society or be segregated into ghettoes, the truth will lie somewhere in between; Arabs “will enter the middle classes and leadership elites [and] will also actively intermarry,” transforming Roman Europe in a subtle but unmistakable way. Full story

• At times, the line between economic theory and psychology seems to disappear. Why do people do what they do? Acquire and use resources the way they do? The two disciplines are equally interested. The battle between “neoclassical” and “behavioralist” economists is a fundamentally psychological study; the former believes that people are rational and calculating in the way they use resources, the latter says we should allow for irrational human quirks. Recent research into how people are presented choices should help reconcile the two camps, says the Economist. Studies of the endowment effect find that people assign subjective worth to items they have owned for a long time or have been given as a gift. You may not need a study to tell you that a family heirloom is worth more than money can say, but does the same principle apply to a chocolate bar? Full story One question the article does not raise is this: isn’t such research merely an attempt to rationalize the sentimental?

• For fans of three storied baseball teams, September is like the signpost at the entry to Dante’s hell, instructing them to abandon hope upon entry. But wait: in a phenomenon that could portend the freezing over of that hell, the Cubs, Red Sox and White Sox have a chance to make the playoffs together for the first time ever, says the New York Times. From there, the chase would be on to end their championship drought of a collective 263 seasons. None of the three has won a World Series since the Woodrow Wilson administration. But Bostonians and Chicagoans have been through deceptively promising Septembers before. Full story*