The Week Link — 10/14/16
How to listen to classical music, why to listen to punk music; the economics of tax evasion and the gender pay gap; and an election update
Welcome to the Week Link, where Nick and I go through the best things we’ve read in the past week. Catch up on past weeks here.
Antonín Dvořák’s “Symphony From The New World” Is The Best, Bar None by Fran Hoepfner for the Awl
Hoepfner’s enthusiasm is great, it’s like what I tried to communicate when I was writing about Chekhov. Hoepfner does a smart, concise analysis of what’s going on in Dvorak’s composition, what it feels like to listen to it, and a really entertaining history. Hoepfner’s going to be writing a weekly series about classical music; I won’t link every week.
It’s the second movement where “Symphony From The New World” really establishes itself as a profoundly complex and beautiful piece of music. Largo — you get used to the fact that the movements of symphonies are more or less named for how they should be played by the musicians, rather than what they are for the audience — translates not to slowly but to broadly. Broadly. It’s not a lack of speed; it’s an increase in depth. On a normal day, I listen to the Largo and feel like it’s a good, substantial piece. On other days, the Largo can absolutely fucking gut me. And I don’t mean that in a “one time, I cried at a painting” sort of way. I mean, it’s the heart of this symphony. I mean, listen to the cellos. They’re the big fat beating heart of this movement.
Africa’s growing internet addiction suggests a new way to understand the problem by Lily Kuo on Quartz
I mean, if you’re reading our blog, you’re probably a pretty heavy internet user. There has not, to my mind, been a piece of writing that really gets what it feels like to be online so much; this one gets at it through one angle.
David Briskham, clinical and development director at Twin Rivers, an “addiction recovery center” in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa says that inquiries for their IA services have increased in the three years since they began offering treatment. He believes addiction across the continent is likely to grow, chalking this up to “boredom, control,” he says. “It’s a technological age where the general public has been brainwashed into believing that the internet… is essential.”
Data is scarce on IA in Africa, but it’s here that prevailing theories about what causes IA can be put to the test. One, that IA occurs more in places with higher internet penetration rates and GDP per capita, is based on the theory of “availability as a law of addition.” Access to the internet and other ICT services should mean a higher rate of internet addiction. But in Algeria, internet penetration is only about 33%, compared to 80% in South Korea, believed to have the highest rate of internet addiction in the world.
Panama: The Hidden Trillions by Alan Rusbridger in the New York Review of Books
I love NYRB’s overviews of vast literatures; in this case, not just the Panama Papers, but a bunch of scholarly books about tax evasion. NYRB also provides the first really good telling of how the Panama Papers were discovered and analyzed, which is way more interesting than I expected. There’s good historical context — how the changes the British Empire went through produced contemporary international financial systems — and good contemporary context, about just how extensive tax evasion is and how much it has devastated African development.
Interesting as the individual characters are — and the dryness of tax avoidance schemes certainly needs a bad-guy narrative to keep the reader reading — the mechanisms of how money that should be taxed is instead routinely kept offshore are just as gripping. Harding was fascinated by the pristine respectability of the London offshore enablers: “I think the kind of big reveal for me was the role played by the West, and law firms, and banks, and so on,” he told his Oxford seminar. “It’s easy to think kleptocracy is a problem of faraway, nasty countries, about which we don’t want to inquire too deeply, but it turned out that we’re the biggest crooks of all, actually, in that we facilitate this.”
The Crimson Ghost by Emma Stamm in The New Inquiry
This is a brilliant memoir-y type piece that does some of what David Foster Wallace was famous for: really recursive, rigorous investigation into what the author feels, why she feels that way, and the details of the outside world she relates to. In this case, it’s about why a strait-laced student/young person feels a strong connection to out-of-control, self-destructive showmen. It’s so delightfully specific and convincing.
Every now and then, even those among us who enjoyed a more or less successful transition from adolescence to adulthood need to be reminded of what it feels like to fall in love with ourselves by way of an external object of adoration. For those who love performers such as Danzig, the force of this self-love is compounded by the fact that the one we adore rejects us: their dismissal of us makes our adoration seem all the more like a function of our authentic selves. It feels endogenous, as opposed to the desired outcome produced by an external force, as would be the case with the painstakingly cultivated (and highly lucrative) fandom of mainstream celebrity vehicles (see: Bieber, etc.)
The Last Time I Saw Basquiat by Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books
I didn’t think much of this short piece the first time I read it, but it’s really stuck with me, so I’m linking to it. Sante’s a writer, I guess also an artist? Basquiat, of course, was a compelling outside-the-system artist who died in his twenties.
He was sleeping on the floors of a rotating set of NYU dorm rooms then. He had no money at all. He had recently stopped tagging as SAMO and had renamed himself MAN-MADE, although that wasn’t a tag but a signature for things he made, T-shirts and collages and these color-Xerox postcards, which he sold for a buck or two. Eventually he sold one to Henry Geldzahler and one to Andy Warhol, and his name became currency.
“Is this what it looks like when a party falls apart?” by FiveThirtyEight
I am a huge fan of FiveThirtyEight, and this is a particularly excellent piece by them. It’s a chat, amongst several of the writers and editors, discussing how extreme the crisis facing the Republican party is, and using their typical approach to see what historical precedent can inform our expectations. It does a good job of stressing how unusual the things happening right now are, and laying out what may happen to the party going forward.
“The main fight for the Republican Party of the future, to me, is between cultural conservatives (Trump) and social conservatives (think Ted Cruz). The fiscal conservatives are a tiny faction. Someone like Ryan is lost, in my opinion.”
“I mean, what if we’ve reached a point where the white nationalist coalition is the largest plurality in the GOP?”
“In the sense, the racist vote is always a bloc for either party. Until the 1960s, it was the Democrats. Now, the Republicans are contending with it. So they’re there, they vote. But they’re not often a plurality.”
“The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap” by Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics
This is a very interesting piece that does a solid, nuanced job of exploring the gender pay gap — to what extent it really exists, and what can be done about it. It’s actually a podcast, but a full transcript is provided, so you can choose whether you’d rather read or listen. The piece is largely in interview with Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, who has done a lot of the leading research on this question. I learned quite a bit from her, and believe it will improve most people’s understanding of the topic.
Goldin and Katz would both show up in the Census data as post-secondary teachers. And in this case, the female teacher earns a few dollars more than her male counterpart. But what if Goldin had decided some years back to find somewhere less-demanding to work than at Harvard? Maybe she needed to care for some family members; maybe she wanted to study opera singing on the side. Whatever. So perhaps she opted out of the Ivy League tenure track for a different teaching job that didn’t pay as much.
Well, if that were the case, she and Larry Katz would still both show up in the Census data as post-secondary teachers — but now the female worker is earning a lot less than the male counterpart. You multiply that story by a few million and you have a huge pay gap between men and women.
In some ways it’s a self-inflicted wound — women make choices that lead to smaller monetary returns. On the other hand, society is set up in such a way that those choices are often not really very optional. So, what’s to be done about it?”
