The Week Link — 9/2/16
Football conference realignment stories, private prison abuses, and a heroic poet
By Nicholas Keywork and Sam Mather
Welcome to the Week Link! Every Friday, we share things designed to bring you up on interesting developments, make you think about things in a new way, or just appreciate good writing. Catch up on last week’s here!
The Comfort of a Digital Confidante by Navneet Alang at The Atlantic
It is very easy to relate to the desire to express one’s self openly and honestly without fear of repercussions. Alang examines the intersection between technology and humanity, and the ways tech has tried to help people do just that. The greatest insight, to me, is a reminder that in many instances, technology isn’t “changing” who we are, but working to address the same human desires and impulses that we’ve always had.
Secret Keeper, an app for Alexa, lets you whisper a private thought to Alexa, and protect it with a password. Your secret will either be locked away forever, or it can be heard anonymously by others. There are of course worries that come with trusting one’s skeletons to the cloud. But the appeal of the app is obvious — it lets you get something off your chest. It also suggests that sometimes, who listens isn’t important; what matters is simply saying it out loud.
Using technology as a kind of lockbox for what is private is not new. First there were diaries with locks, or messages written onto paper and then stuffed into bottles cast into the ocean. In each there was a kind of yearning to be heard, without suffering the social consequences of disclosure. It’s as if what we want isn’t a real connection, but the release of an imagined perfect one.
How the World Works by James Fallows in The Atlantic
This was written before I was born! The title is grandiose, but the essay is not. Fallows surveys non-Anglophone economic theory in light of Asian economic growth, argues that the free market ideas we’re all familiar with are actually less widely held (and more self-interested) than we think, and that the current historical moment in international politics has been seen before. It’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted to read in college, but as Fallows says, theorists who are no longer orthodox aren’t taught.
Without saying so explicitly, today’s British and American economists act as if the economic principles they follow had a similar hard, provable, undebatable basis… If you don’t accept the views derived from Adam Smith — that free competition is ultimately best for all participants, that protection and interference are inherently wrong — then you are a flat-earther.
Outside the United States and Britain the matter looks quite different…In the non-Anglophone world Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies…
In Japan economics has in effect been considered a branch of geopolitics — that is, as the key to the nation’s strength or vulnerability in dealing with other powers. From this practical-minded perspective English-language theorists seem less useful than their challengers, such as Friedrich List.
In the Attic of Early Islam by Robert F. Worth in the New York Review of Books
A beautiful reflection about a medieval Egyptian book that anticipated Diderot’s Encyclopedia, called The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. Ambition has just been translated into English (in abridged form) for the first time, although it has long been known as an important work in Arabic. Robert Worth covers the more shocking tidbits, draws a sketch of Egyptian life at the time, tells us about the author, Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (soldier and bureaucrat), and works in a bit of melancholy about the passage of time.
Religion aside, the book is full of strange myths and nostrums that hint at what mattered to people in the fourteenth century: sex, money, power, perfume. Nuwayri retails directions for incense and fragrance that are so elaborate it is hard to believe anyone really followed them. (One begins, “Take one hundred mithqāls of rare Tibetan musk and pound it after cleaning it of organ matter and hair.”) Then again, people and cities must have smelled awful, and olfactory relief made a difference. There are also many formulae for enlarging the penis, tightening the vagina, enemas, suppositories, contraceptives, and other sexual aids, with titles like “A Recipe for Another Medicine that Produces Indescribable Pleasure.”
Realignment in Retrospect: the Best Stories from This Round of Moves by Andy Staples at Sports Illustrated
College football officially begins this weekend, and in honor of that, here’s an old article about conference realignment. I try to make sure my sport-related articles can be read by those without much tie to the sport, so this article focuses on the personal and institutional interactions between the schools. It’s comforting in a perverse way to know that massive university agreements are made not by strictly logical processes, but by feelings, who tells the best story, and who can be pettiest. My personal favorites are the TCU and Texas A&M stories.
On Oct. 13, 2011, Jurich called then-Big East commissioner John Marinatto and University of South Florida president Judy Genshaft and told them Louisville would play somewhere else beginning in July ’14. Where exactly? Jurich had no idea.
My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard by Shane Bauer at Mother Jones
This piece is very long, with good reason. As the title implies, the author “went undercover”, taking a job at a private prison, and he details all the disregard and carelessness and abuses that went on during his time. The stories will probably not be surprising, but certainly leave no ambiguity about what the priorities of these organizations are.
“I wanted to check with you about something. I meant to do it on Friday, but, uh… When we had a class by the mental health director, she told us to report if there was any kind of suicidal — “
She cuts me off, waving her hand dismissively, and starts walking away.
“No, but it was like a letter thing — “
“Yeah, don’t even worry about that,” she says, still walking toward her door.
“Really?”
“Mmmhmmm. That’s if you see something going on down there,” she says, pointing toward the units. “Yeah, don’t worry about it. All right.”
“If they feel their rights have been violated in some way, they are allowed to file a grievance,” he says. If the captain rejects it, they can appeal to the warden. If the warden rejects it, they can appeal to the Department of Corrections. “It’ll take about a year,” he says. “Once it gets to DOC down in Baton Rouge, they throw it over in a pile and forget about it. I’ve been to DOC headquarters. I know what them sonsabitches do down there: nothin’.” (Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, later tells me that during the 15 years she worked at Winn, she saw only one grievance result in consequences for staff. )
The Secret Auden by Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books
In a grim election year, this is a touching article about a genuinely good man. The poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973), although famous, hid most of his charitable work so well that biographers and scholars are only learning about it now. Mendelson makes an intriguing case that Auden’s actions, and his quietness about them, can be linked to moral beliefs he communicated in his poems.
…Auden had once been told that a friend needed a medical operation that he couldn’t afford. Auden invited the friend to dinner, never mentioned the operation, but as the friend was leaving said, “I want you to have this,” and handed him a large notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety. The University of Texas bought the notebook and the friend had the operation.
From some letters I found in Auden’s papers, I learned that a few years after World War II he had arranged through a European relief agency to pay the school and college costs for two war orphans chosen by the agency, an arrangement that continued, later with new sets of orphans, until his death at sixty-six in 1973.
…Auden had many motives for portraying himself as rigid or uncaring when he was making unobtrusive gifts of time, money, and sympathy. In part he was reacting against his own early fame as the literary hero of the English left.
