I just finished one of the best things I’ve read on the difficulties and joys of being a parent, Carvell Wallace’s piece in the June 21 NY Times Magazine (and I continue to be impressed by the way the magazine has improved by leaps and bounds); I gobbled it up, but I had to stop at one point to look up a word:
My son’s school is only a few blocks away. He has, I presume, ditched class here, shopped for shoes here, watched drug deals and fights here, gotten boba here, gotten sandwiches from the shop here where the lady knows every student by name, sat on a bench after school here, just growing up, minute by minute, experience by experience.
“Boba?” (I thought) — “what the hell is boba?” So I googled and discovered it’s another name for bubble tea, something I have heard of but never seen; it hadn’t been invented yet when I was in Taiwan in the 1970s. That Wikipedia article says “In the United States there is a geographic split with the west coast referring to the drink as ‘boba’ and the east coast calling it ‘bubble tea,'” so I guess my East Coast residence explains my ignorance. (Apparently boba is a Chinese word, 波霸 — anybody know anything about its history?) In any event, consider this a public service message for those as ignorant as I.
I’ve always heard that it was related to tea shop in Taiwan run by someone who was obsessed by the Hong Kong cinema star Amy Yip. I can’t do blockquote tagging, but this quote is copied from another site:
“Lastly boba milk tea (波霸/奶/茶 po- baˋ naiˇ chaˊ). “Boba” here is not the literal meaning of 波霸. 波霸 is a vulgar slang which means “big boobs”. Yeah. BIG BOOB milk tea. Why the name 波霸奶茶 emerged (as 珍珠奶茶mentioned beforehand is the most widely used name in Taiwan and probably the official name) was because about 3 decades ago, a tea shop in southern Taiwan was inspired by a Hong Kong actress, more like a sex symbol, Amy Yip, who happened to have disproportionately large breasts. As the name 波霸 getting more popular, it was later commonly used to refer to regular size tapioca. The smaller one, originally called 粉圓 (fenˇ yuanˊ), became extensively known as 珍珠. (the word 粉圓 still exists today though) “Boba” was later introduced into the west as people immigrated to America. To my sense, calling boba tea is a bit trendier than calling bubble tea.”
https://medium.com/@stanchen/culture-boba-bubble-or-pearl-tea-7edb1f4ec46e
I am sure there are better accounts online, but this is the gist and can give some keywords to google for further information. Apologies for lack of formatting but my internet is limited at the moment.
The Wiktionary has linguistic details:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B3%A2%E9%9C%B8#
Thanks — I’d never have guessed!
In the Bay Area in the early 2000’s this substance was generally called “pearl milk tea”. I only learned “boba” when I went to LA for college, and “bubble tea” sometime after that. I’m not sure if this regionalism has survived. (Since Carvell Wallace is in Oakland, maybe not, but maybe it’s South Bay-specific?)
Being introduced here right now as bubble tea.
Sure you can: <blockquote>quote goes here</blockquote>.
Second character in boba – 霸 – featured rather prominently in my five volume history of ancient China.
A whole chapter was devoted to it claiming that hegemon 霸 ba was the defining concept which explains everything about history of Western Zhou, ancient China or entire Chinese civilization even.
Funny how it got to mean big boobs now.
Since this is about the New York Times, I’ll just link my current favourite newspaper series here. It’s little more than a list of quick classical music suggestions with a heading like ‘Mozart’ or ‘Cello Pieces’ and brief explanations, but some of the explanations by musicians have useful information (the latest one, about Beethoven piano sonatas, by the NY Times’s head music critic, a pianist, is very good like that). And it works well with Spotify.
Is “bubble” an eggcorn?
Re vulgar slang, I am informed by wiktionary that “Originally Hong Kong Cantonese; 波 (bo1) is from English ball.”
This was presumably just picking a character for the loanword which was a soundalike, without worrying about the historical semantics to which SFReader alluded. Of course, “big balls” in vulgar English slang means something rather different from “big boobs.”
Is “bubble” an eggcorn?
I wondered, too. We used to get it in the local Vietnamese ‘hood since the early 2000s (I guess the fact that my kids had Taiwanese friends might have helped?) and I was always like, what bubbles?
Gossip Tapioca, the go-to restaurant here, is officially describing its cuisine as Vietnamese and its tapioca drinks as boba. Their menu says that “tapioca balls” first got into drinks in the early 1980s Taiwan, and that boba just means tapioca.
Re vulgar slang, I am informed by wiktionary that “Originally Hong Kong Cantonese; 波 (bo1) is from English ball.”
And saying ‘basketball’ in HK creases everybody up in fits of embarrassed giggles, so much so that nobody will explain. Notably, you carry a shopping bag, not a shopping basket.
I just recalled that Soviet “hegemonism” (ba quan zhu) was favorite accusation of Chinese propaganda under Mao.
No doubt that’s why so many Soviet sinologists devoted so much effort to find out what exactly the Chinese meant by 霸 and how come this obscure term from Western Zhou era suddenly came to apply to the Soviet Union.
Being introduced here right now as bubble tea.
“Here” is where? In the part of Germany where I live bubble tea was the “in” thing about 4-5 years ago, when my daughter was in the last classes of high school. Most of the bubble tea shops that opened back then closed after a year or two, when the first craze was over.
Look out – these are the subject of a new rumor something like the old one that swallowed chewing gum never digests and makes a big ball in your stomach: https://www.eater.com/2019/6/12/18662780/undigested-boba-tapioca-pearls-girls-stomach-zhejiang-china
Here in Bangkok it’s been around as a craze for several years but, like the US and COVID, seems to either be beginning a second wave, or the first wave never really ended… new stands still seem to be opening on every corner. I think there’s one stall I pass that has been a coffee stand, a matcha place, a fruit smoothie seller, and now a purveyor of boba, all within 3 or 4 years.
I think we say “pearl” most often to communicate with the Thai sellers, possibly followed by “bubble”.
A part of southwestern Berlin populated mainly by old people 🙂 That said, I didn’t notice it elsewhere in Berlin before that one shop opened either. Maybe the older shops are all on the Prenzlauer “Berg”.
Second character in boba – 霸
It’s also the second character in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naha
Orbitz! — and that was 1997, died 1998, subject of some very early memes. I remember finding a lonesome carton of it in a bargain shop a number of years later, I think in Sweden of all places, so I actually tasted it “for the lulz” — shelf life may have been measured in decades, like Twinkies there was nothing in them that could go bad and the taste was not memorable. I haven’t felt the need to try the new kind, though.
@lars
Your “for the lulz” was my first exposure to this expression, I do not see it catching on in Holland, at least with a non-rude meaning.
In the part of Germany where I live bubble tea was the “in” thing about 4-5 years ago,
We had a bubble tea in Vienna right on the Ringstraße about 5 years ago but it didn’t last 12 months. I think I have seen one or two other locations but it never even made it to „craze“ status.
They were quite popular in Boston decades ago. We used to drink them in the 90s.
I’d heard of it before but mostly from Vietnam, and never in that context. So apparently it has the same reputation as boza? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boza
Growing up in the ’80s in Bulgaria, drinking boza was reputed to encourage the growing of big breasts.
I (eastern US) have never encountered bubble tea in person. I grew up in California, but left before bubble tea reached there. Indeed, I only know such a thing exists from TwoSet violin, two classical violinists with a popular YouTube channel. They are Australian of Chinese ancestry. They occasionally have bubble tea on camera, clearly considering it a treat. It sounds quite unappetizing to me, but you never know…
I mean I’ve heard about it from some Vietnamese-Bulgarian people I know. Edit: I just remembered there’s actually a place in Sofia where they serve bubble tea next to ЦУМ I think.
So: “she has hegemonic breasts” is probably praise, but “he has hegemonic testicles” might be insulting (cf. Spanish huevón ‘stupid person, lazy person’, lit. ‘egg/testicle+AUG’).
It sounds quite unappetizing to me, but you never know…
I tried it once — milky tea with gelatinous lumps — like overly sweet and very watery tapioca pudding. It did not appeal.
David L: yeah, the way it was described to me, my reaction was “why would anyone want to drink this”. But that can be said about many people’s reactions when Boza is described to them, also. And while I’m not fond of Boza, I’m not averse to it, either.
JC: where do they say huevon?
@PP, I’m not a leetspeak connoisseur and I quite possibly got my periods mixed, but as I understood it lulz was originally just the plural action noun to lol — before anon and 4chan and all that.
That’s how I understand it.
@JC:
Hegemonic, dude!
We called it “bubble tea” when I drank in on the West Coast in the early 2000s. In my mind, “boba” is a more recent import into English, but that might be a case of the eponymous recency effect. My idiosyncratic stereotype is that a white North American who says “boba” grew up with K-Pop, but one who says “bubble tea” grew up with Dragon Ball Z.
I’m gonna start using “hegemonic” to mean “impressive/great.” I bet it’ll catch on in no time!
JC: where do they say huevon?
Latin America and specifically Mexico, says Wikt_en. It’s semantically similar to novelón ‘long, boring novel; great novel; pulp novel’.
a white North American who says “boba” grew up with K-Pop, but one who says “bubble tea” grew up with Dragon Ball Z.
Or pre-dates both of them, as in my case. But I never heard of boba until this very post.
This makes me sentimental for my favorite Denver steakhouse — Cowboba’s, the bubble tea steakhouse.
>NY Times Magazine (and I continue to be impressed by the way the magazine has improved by leaps and bounds)
You’re not the only one. In fact, I think no one is more impressed than the magazine’s Editor themselves. In many periodicals, I look to the Letters to the Editor first. I consider it my duty to see what I may have learned previously that was arguably wrong.
But the Times Magazine has never published anything incorrect or misleading. As a result, each letter they accept for publication can follow a template:
“Mr xx, I’m dumbstruck. Your piece is the most astounding writing I’ve read … no experienced … in years.”
or
“To hear this experience told in such a lovely way, of describing hope, fear, angst and love of living, was inescapable.” (If you’re wondering, yes, “inescapable” is being used as a superlative here.)
or
“This incredible piece moved me to tears.”
You think I’m mocking them for their self-congratulation. But as with Pres. Trump, mockery is impossible, because they eclipse all effort at caricature. These aren’t made up. These are the actual intros of the first three letters of this week’s magazine. Want more? The next several include “thank you for giving all of yourself,” “what a gift to read this” and “I haven’t read an essay that touched me so deeply …”
I used to want to write a Shouts and Murmurs for the New Yorker about it, but they can’t be satirized.
Anyone who bridles at the idea that liberals and Democrats match conservatives and Republicans for the insularity of their respective bobas should consider the Times Magazine letters section and repent.
In my opinion, it’s stomach-turning. I can’t read a magazine so unwilling to countenance dissent.
I had it in Taiwan first, I think, around 1989, or maybe 1993.
It’s quite common in Beijing but I’ve only seen it called 珍珠奶茶 ‘pearl tea’.
There is at least one place I’ve seen selling it in UB. The signage outside is in English, if I remember rightly, and I’ve never been inside.
I find it pleasant enough, a sweetish milky drink. The treat is to chew on the ‘pearls’.
I can’t read a magazine so unwilling to countenance dissent.
Seriously? You refuse to read the articles because you don’t like the letters section? Whatever works for you, I guess.
Yes, 霸權 / 霸权 bàquán is pejorative in China. It’s not surprising that the Chinese would use it in modern times since they are well in touch with their history, at least that part that belongs to the Chinese ‘canon’. It’s familiar to the Japanese, too, especially in the term 覇権主義 haken shugi ‘hegemonism’.
I checked the Wikipedia article on 霸權 / 霸权 and found that the Chinese article is mostly translated from the English article — although only parts of it.
It starts with a succinct definition, which is not based on any single part of the English:
“Hegemony or hegemonism (English: Hegemony or Hegemonism) refers to the ideology of a policy whereby one country, by virtue of its great political, military, and economic advantages, controls the sovereignty of other countries, dominates international affairs, or seeks dominance in the world or individual regions.” (The Chinese is a bit awkward when translated into English but you get the gist.)
It then looks at history. For ‘ancient times’ it cycles through Sparta, Macedonia, Athens, the Persians, and only then ancient China, followed by Rome, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, Harsha (northern India), Eastern Rome, and the Carolingians. For modern times it gives the Japanese empire, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the US. That’s it.
The article is based on the idea that 霸權 / 霸权 is an exact equivalent of the English word ‘hegemony’. While the ‘internationalisation of knowledge’ has its good side (it’s nice that the article presents a global view of ‘hegemony’ within a wider framework), the result of the ‘hegemony of English’ in this case is a complete failure to convey the background of the Chinese term 霸權 / 霸权 and its significance in Chinese history, which must be considered essential knowledge for any Chinese reader.
The modern examples are also somewhat cherry-picked, although that might be the fault of the English. 霸權 / 霸权 is actually a criticism levelled against present-day China by critics who know the Chinese term.
I’m not sure that the magazine would turn out to have aged well in general if revisited, but one of the great running features of Spy magazine back in the day was their “letters to the editor of The New Yorker,” which they published (and maybe also wrote, I don’t know about that part) because The New Yorker itself, in those days, famously declined to include a published letters-to-the-editor section. Which was in hindsight perhaps a good policy, because once The New Yorker changed its position and finally added a letters to the editor section the letters therein tended to confirm all of ones negative stereotypes about the smugness and fatuity of The New Yorker’s core audience. OTOH, maybe they emphasized letters from those sorts of readers because those were exactly the readers they were telling advertisers they could deliver, and any hint of the interesting or contrarian would spook the advertisers?
霸權 / 霸权 is actually a criticism levelled against present-day China by critics who know the Chinese term.
Has Chairman Xi been making inquiries about weight of nine tripod cauldrons?
Oh, I like bubble tea. I first tasted it in mainland China and then in Taiwan. It took me a few years to really appreciate the tapioca pearls, though, first I liked the milk tea the most and the tapioca was just weird. I’ve drinken it in Germany a few years back too, but here in Sweden it hasn’t taken off. There are a few Chinese places that sell it, but not many and usually as take away only. I’ve heard that “bubble” can refer to the bubbles in the milk, not the tapioca pearls, but I don’t know if it’s true.
>Seriously? You refuse to read the articles because you don’t like the letters section? Whatever works for you, I guess.
You write phenomenally educated, well-written posts on a daily basis. Yet nearly every one is refined and improved by the contributions of your readers.
Yes, I distrust a news organization when the organization as a whole has so protected itself with own bubble-wrap against contact with outside reality that it has to publish reams of self-congratulatory crap like that each and every week.
Individual writers, I don’t mind. They’re subject to their editors, publishers, in most places to the corrections or even different perspectives of readers.
I don’t see how you can read those letters and not lose respect for the organization that would publish them. “Your magazine is so incredible. I’ve never felt so thoroughly in touch with a subject. I trembled as I read the closing sentences …” Week-in and week-out.
The letters situation isn’t an isolated aspect of the paper. It’s emblematic of the whole ecosystem the Times is intentionally creating. It’s part of the paper’s self-understanding. How can you not gag when that’s what a paper thinks of itself. How can you not think “they’re missing much of life?”
To me, being that afraid of dissenting viewpoints, that self-congratulatory, inherently leads you to miss much of what is happening.
I would expect better from People Magazine. I expect better, and get it, from the local cop blog where I write dissenting comments regularly, and see them moderated and then posted. But, by reading it, I’m not unaware of their perspective, and the aspects of truth in their perspective.
I am very willing to say Black Lives Matter. I think police reform is vitally important. I write to tell cops that. However, I am also aware that Eric Holder’s FBI exonerated Darren Wilson in Ferguson, reporting that many of the witnesses who initially supported Wilson later recanted, perjuring themselves, because of threats and fear. The Times has never been able to integrate those facts into its worldview. They continue to mention Hands Up, Don’t Shoot as a slogan uncomplicated by the more confusing reality that gave rise to it, in which Michael Brown resisted arrest violently, tried to take Wilson’s gun, and was in fact running back at him when he was shot.
None of that means we don’t need police reform. But reckoning with it certainly tempers what type of reform will work.
The letters section of the Times is emblematic of their fear — that reckoning with the full complexity and contradictory nature of reality might not lead its readers to the same holy land they believe in. Instead, they must continually remind their readers that everyone who reads has never felt more in touch with reality than when they immersed themselves in the Times version of reality.
It’s not like the Times is indispensable. I get many of the same opinions and more actual hard news from the Washington Post, without the same insularity.
The Times has never been able to integrate those facts into its worldview
Maybe if you allowed yourself to read the Magazine you’d notice your own worldview is out of date. Have you heard of the 1619 Project (for which the Times has taken a lot of flak)? From the latest issue, there’s Isabel Wilkerson’s “America’s Enduring Caste System.” From the previous issue, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “It Is Time for Reparations.” From the one before that, Carvell Wallace’s piece, linked above, which I presume you didn’t read. Maybe you could just skip the letter section?
FWIW, my takeaway from the Wilkerson piece is that if you have the right angle you can get an article published in that particular periodical based on a Big Analogy comparing the U.S. to India while not necessarily knowing as much about Indian society and history as a moderately curious reader who’d read four or five languagehat comment threads on those subjects and maybe followed a few links posted therein would have picked up. As a separate FWIW, I’m not sure if Ryan is correctly attributing to “fear” what can equally plausibly be attributed to “complacency.”
Yeah, the India analogy was unfortunate. I’m certainly not saying the Times is perfect, just that it’s improved a lot.
Languagehat, of course, is perfect.
Reparations for slavery is perfectly fine idea, but I don’t think it would be fair to make the Federal government (which after all went to war to end slavery) to pay them.
Only states which were in the Confederacy should pay.
Isn’t Texas one of the richest states in the country? They can afford it.
As for Alabama or Mississippi, tough luck.
For different reasons I googled up this old Language Log post by Ben Zimmer, and noted that it contains evidence that as of 1923 the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine ran pretty good cartoons. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9695
Both “bubble tea” and “boba” work as search categories in Yelp, and for my city in the western United States both bring up lots of hits.
And in old business: a few weeks ago LH people were thinking of Deweys. The language news about that is that (according to William Safire’s The New Language of Politics) the scornfully cacophonous phrase “Democrat Party” originated with New York’s governor Thomas E. Dewey (no date given) and was then popularized in 1955 by Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall. Quote from Safire: “Some Democrats suggested retaliating by shortening Republican to Publican, but the National Committee overruled them, explaining that Republican ‘is the name by which our opponents’ product is known and mistrusted.'”
>your own worldview is out of date
It’s an interesting term, “out of date.” You wrote it hoping it would be taken pejoratively, but I think it’s accurate. I drafted a longer reply, but it seems like a thread-jack. But you ask me whether I’ve read several specific articles with race as topic or subtext.
I’ve surely read hundreds of thousands of pages, from the memoirs of James Farmer, who occasionally attended my parents’ church, to Taylor Branch’s five volume series on the Civil Rights era; from the slave narratives of the WPA to Zadie Smith; from The World the Slaves Made to Redemption; from newspaper coverage of the race riot in Springfield, IL in 1912 to the extensive coverage of Ferguson in the Times — of Michael Brown, and of his friend Dorian Johnson, who insisted Brown’s hands were up when he died.
No, I haven’t read the four specific pieces you ask about. Perhaps all my reading is out of date.
But since you ask, I think it’s fair to ask, have you read the Justice Department report on Michael Brown’s death?
I have. I started it sharing the Times worldview without qualm, primed by all my reading. Dorian Johnson as righteous witness to the murder of an innocent in cold blood, like in countless cases before and since.
When I finished the report, issued by President Obama’s Justice Department, AG Holder’s Justice Department, my worldview was not intact.
In my worldview today, all of these things are true: Black Lives Matter makes good points, better policing is needed, and also, the facts of Michael Brown’s death after attacking a police officer, struggling for his gun, running away, then turning to attack again; and the credulous acceptance of the Johnson story by most national media, are relevant both to the political uses of Michael Brown’s death, and to the larger debate that it’s a part of.
I fear you’re right. A worldview that insists that the facts of a case are relevant to its political uses is becoming out of date. The Times has spearheaded that movement.
I always find it so funny when the New York Times is classified on the left side in a US context. In a broader view, the NYT is moderately conservative – like most major newspapers in the world! On top of that, other than Murdoch’s, it’s the only major newspaper in the world that was incompetent enough to fall for the blatant lie that Iraq had WMD in 2003.
…That makes a lot of sense.
Over here, it’s considered in the national interest to have a diverse media landscape, and so newspapers receive subsidies out of the federal budget. I had never thought of the side effect that this makes them less dependent on advertisers.
@ Ryan:
A worldview that insists that the facts of a case are relevant to its political uses is becoming out of date
and get off my lawn, you gol-durn kids!
I fear you’re right. A worldview that insists that the facts of a case are relevant to its political uses is becoming out of date. The Times has spearheaded that movement.
I fear you’re one of those people who insist that if something isn’t perfect it’s worthless.
Also, it’s just dumb to treat the letters column as some sort of indicator of quality, and since you’re not dumb, I have to assume bad faith. It’s like condemning a book because its blurbs are all positive.
What set all this off was Hat’s offhand comment that the Times Magazine has recently gotten better. If you think back just a few years, to the time when the magazine was almost nothing but real estate porn, Hat’s conclusion will seem obviously correct.
But from the real estate years there was the moment of hattic comedy when the Trump Organization advertised a new Florida condo to be named Luxuria. To spell out the joke, in Latin luxuria means not luxury but lechery.
And for perspective from way back,1979 was the year when Joseph Heller in Good As Gold gave literature a fatuous pundit (Norman Podhoretz à clef) who got all his ideas from his stack of Times Magazines.
Some Democrats suggested retaliating by shortening Republican to Publican
Nowadays I favor “Respooblikan.”
without the same insularity
As the New Yorker is not edited for a little old lady in Peoria, so the NYT is edited for people who actually do live on islands (or at least 83% of them do). Of course we are insular.
I have the four drawings by Saul Steinberg of the view from Central Park northward, eastward, southward (the New Yorker cover) and westward on the appropriate walls of my bedroom (well, sort of: in Manhattan north is really northeast and so on).
shortening Republican to Publican
In a tale of times to come written by a friend of mine, a character named Athanasia is puzzling over the phrase “republicans and sinners” found in an ancient and fragmentary source. As she tells it, she knows that sinners are those who broke religious laws, and tentatively concludes that republicans are those who broke secular laws, but she admits the matter is still highly uncertain.
Surely the New Yorker Steinberg map is oriented westward?
Westward! turn westward! O Time in thy flight / Make me a child again just for tonight. Another oops on my part.
My wife is a magazine editor. When we met, she asked, apropos my New Yorker subscription, what I read first. I said the Letters. As a responsibility, to see what I’d imbibed blindly that I should have been more skeptical of. I just checked, since we let our subscription lapse. Their letters today are better than the NYT, but lacking the vigor that would make it a destination. Even the New York Review rarely has the lively exchanges that used to characterize its letters. I no longer go to the Letters there first, after too many disappointments.
I find surprising the idea that one should expect no more from Letters to the Editor than from blurbs. It’s a hallowed tradition of American letters so to speak, something no decent periodical did without, a part of the democratic experiment.
>I have to assume bad faith.
I certainly said nothing to justify that.
>And get off my lawn
Of course, but one question. Should i hear your words in the voice of the Pope in translation in the old, old joke with that punch line, that of a man on his private cul de sac, holding an assault rifle while his lunatic wife waves a pistol next to him, or just that of a normal grumpy old man unwilling to engage with those outside his comfort zone?
And alas for the pride of Manhattanites, but the New Yorker, like the Times, has far more subcribers outside the boroughs. Both most assuredly ARE written for little old ladies in Peoria. You’ve still got the Daily News, though!
The insularity of the Times is political, not topographic.
You can read whatever you like first, but to judge the quality of the magazine by the letters column is idiotic. If you prefer to be thought an idiot, that’s your choice. The New Yorker has risen to the challenge of the current hellish situation magnificently.
Just so we’re clear, I agree with you about the letters column; of course they should publish a wider range of reaction (although you seem to assume they neither read nor take into consideration the letters they don’t publish, which is unwarranted). My issue is with the idea that you can dismiss an entire publication on the basis of the letters they publish, which is (as I said) like judging a book by its blurbs.
I never read the NYer much, but I read the NYT before I moved or had any expectation of moving to NYC, so I know that. But the paper’s viewpoint, its editorial stance (in a sense wider than the political) is indeed insular and Steinbergian: New York first, the world second. (This probably has a lot to do with the lack of actually national newspapers in the US, if you ignore that rag USA Today and the Wall Street Journal; what purports to be a national newspaper is a local one grown vast in its readership.)
The WSJ used to publish something called the National Observer.
But the paper’s viewpoint, its editorial stance (in a sense wider than the political) is indeed insular and Steinbergian: New York first, the world second.
It’s a NYC paper, for heaven’s sake; of course it prominently covers New York. The point is that it used to view the city and the world pretty much exclusively from the viewpoint of well-off white males, strongly favoring real-estate development and the like regardless of consequences; it has been forced, kicking and screaming, to add women and people of color to its staff and actually let their perspectives be visible in the paper, and the result is a vast improvement. If your complaint is that they don’t cover Peoria sufficiently, I don’t know what to tell you.
The question of not judging a paper by the Letters page seems akin to the wholesome advice nowadays given to readers of newspaper articles online: Never read the comments.
My properly-left-wing children have been known to enjoy the Letters to the Daily Telegraph, in a sort of postmodern ironic performance-art sort of way. It does seem unlikely that these people are actually for real.
Hat: Oh, I’m not complaining at all. I’m merely saying at great length that it is no surprise that the NYT is parochial and indeed insular, given its history and its position in the industry. Indeed, I am saying that these properties are no cause for complaint.
Ah, gotcha. Then we are in agreement.
>to judge the quality of the magazine by the letters column is idiotic.
On the one hand, I want to refer to the word “emblematic” above to show how badly this misrepresents what I’ve said.
But why bother?
> If you prefer to be thought an idiot, that’s your choice.
Because nothing I’ve said was remotely in this register, nor comes close to justifying this type of response.
It’s an interesting reaction. Not wholly unrelated to my point about the Times and its choice of letters “fit to print”, I think.
On the one hand, I want to refer to the word “emblematic” above to show how badly this misrepresents what I’ve said.
How exactly does it misrepresent what you’ve said? As far as I can see, you’ve said all along that you dismiss the magazine because of the letters it prints. But maybe I’m the idiot — explain to me simply and clearly, and if I’m wrong, I will gladly apologize.
I wrote that the embarrassingly self-congratulatory letters are problematic, but also emblematic of the hermetically sealed ecosystem the Times has intentionally created around itself, where other viewpoints literally have no place, and as a result, important parts of our landscape are utterly misunderstood.
Letters and Op Eds are normally (or at least were traditionally) places where American journals allow other viewpoints to leak in. Readers understand to take them with a grain of salt. It’s safe to trust readers to do so.
That Eddyshaw would conflate them with internet comments is interesting. Letters have always been selected and edited. Nonetheless, or maybe as a result, they had almost always, in my experience of American periodicals, offered substantive dissent from the prevailing perspective of the journal.
A couple weeks ago, a senior editor at the Times was fired after a revolt in the newsroom, for having the audacity of allowing an Op-Ed piece from a US Senator whose general opinion on the topic was shared by a majority of the country, a majority of Democrats, and a majority of African Americans. I would have defined the editor’s responsibility as bringing in such viewpoints, but he was fired for that offense.
I’m not saying I support the details of the Cotton editorial on the National Guard. But it should have launched, not a call for firing, but a discussion of a variety of things, at least one of which is why NYT reporters have a perspective out of sync with so many African Americans even as they claim to represent them.
Something relevant that has received little attention, but should get far more, is the leaked tape of Chicago aldermen speaking with Mayor Lightfoot in the aftermath of the looting that took advantage of the Floyd protests. These were African Americans who actually do represent African American neighborhoods, speaking outside the ear of liberal reporters.
If you listen (but no one was willing to read the DOJ report, so who am I kidding?), what you hear is one African American alderperson after another, calling for the police to be more aggressive, literally calling for the National Guard as Cotton did.
This is not wild-eyed GOP/racist hysteria. This is the elected representatives of the African American community in Chicago. Not one made an excuse for looters. None that I heard said that they were concerned that their calls for a more aggressive police presence and even military patrols would lead to abuse (the tape is more than an hour, and I didn’t listen to every minute.)
The Mayor, an African American woman, doesn’t say “we can’t do that, because it might lead to abuse.” She says she simply doesn’t have the security resources to get it done. That she’s thrown everything she could at it. That the police could only clear Madison and Pulaski after “gassing” the looter/rioters. She says this with exasperation that it could take that, but with no hint of concern that it was the wrong thing to do.
There is no place at the Times for the idea that the primary role of the police is to provide security TO and FOR African American communities; that the primary impact of aggressive policing has been a reduction in violence in those communities, that it was largely inspired by sympathy for those communities and by public opinion IN those communities, and that most African Americans want more (but better) policing. Increasingly, there is no place for that simple reality in mainstream media.
As I’ve repeatedly said, none of this denies the truths that BLM has brought forward. But the debate, framed in many ways by New York media, suppresses important aspects of the truth, and that is likely to lead to disaster, first to abandonment of that important function of police; and then to a return of the “what can you do?” attitude that the riots of the 60s brought, and 2-3 decades in which African American men die at horrendous, unconscionable rates as they did in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Ie, before Bill Bratton, Paul Vallas and the Clinton crime bill and the “put 100,000 more police on the streets” approach.
I actually think that a part of this dichotomy relates in interesting ways to John Cowan’s post and my reply, about the New Yorker being in New York, but “of” the American intellectual elite. I’d have let it go if I didn’t think it was relevant to the other things I’m talking about here. Not in that vague “ah, you damned estabishment people don’t understand us hicks and yokels way.”
But in this very specific way.
New York solved the problem of violence in an American city. That is something like a modern miracle. It frames our understanding of who we are. We are no longer the nation of Fort Apache, the Bronx.
That few other cities duplicated New York’s success is a largely unexamined disaster of American life.
The American intellectual elite, nationwide, discusses violence, police and abuse as if they in the relatively peaceful city whose periodicals they read, where police abuse may actually be a significant fraction of the violence men inflict on each other.
As if, or maybe because, their neighborhoods and suburbs all fit in the happy topography of the famous Steinberg map, letting them forget the neighborhoods a few miles away, whose chaotic street violence never touches them, but continues to be the primary fear of the people who live in them.
That few other cities duplicated New York’s success is a largely unexamined disaster of American life.
Your President mentioned the “carnage” in his inaugural speech, as I recall, by which I imagine he meant this very disaster that you allude to.
A person less prone to “examine” things or help others understand them I can scarcely imagine.
I’m not sure of your intent. Many would say it as a guffaw. “You’re saying what Trump did!”
I hope no one will think I’m merely channeling Trump by highlighting the voices of elected representatives of African Americans on the subject of policing. By not denying BLM, but pointing out there is much more complexity than the pages of the Times are willing to admit.
It is an interesting situation that Trump could take a commonplace of European and elite American discourse – that American cities are too violent – and make it into something anathema to many of the same people. I get it. He blamed it all on Obama, which is grotesque, and the reaction is visceral.
But we seem to have decided that if the other party believes something, for whatever reason, we must deny that there is any truth in it. If Tom Cotton says call in the National Guard, we must defenestrate those on our side who let him say it, and pretend that it is not a widespread opinion among the people whose interests we’re purporting to defend.
The guffaw, the quick insult to isolate, is now the currency of American politics. The policing that everyone believes in is policing the boundaries of the discourse.
Or perhaps that’s naive, and it ever was.
A person less prone to “examine” things or help others understand them I can scarcely imagine.
Sad, but true. I will never make it as a moral or even intellectual guide. Still:
I do know in fact what you mean. I just think it’s very easy (even for perfectly decent people such as yourself) to be suckered in to supporting oppression by swallowing the right-wing narrative. It’s the lure of “All lives matter.” Undeniably true. But the question to be asked is “Yes, but why are you saying that now?” It’s not mindless politically-correct conformism to ask that question, and it seems to me that in decrying the “self-congratulatory” nature of liberal discourse you’re in danger of falling into the trap of labelling virtue as hypocrisy. There is a time to pick sides. I do nevertheless take your point that being (properly) partisan ought not to entail ignoring inconvenient truths.
Still: I would be worried, myself, to find that I was echoing a deliberate falsification of Trump’s, even if my own motives were very different from his (as yours plainly are.) I might worry that I was being played.
Letters have always been selected and edited.
Comments are also selected, at least in the sense of not being removed. And as for editing, that can be explained by the notorious inelasticity of paper.
I would have defined the editor’s responsibility
The first responsibility of a senior official of any organization is not to embarrass the organization publicly. That’s, for example, why Brendan Eich resigned, clearly under threat of being fired, from the CEOship of Mozilla Inc. Justice (except in the matter of severance) doesn’t enter into it.
There is no place at the Times for the idea that […] the primary impact of aggressive policing has been a reduction in violence in those communities
There’s no evidence for it either. Violence has been in a secular decline for the last 500 years, approximately, with occasional spikes of the World Wars were by far the worst. The reason for the spike in the West in the 70s and 80s has been much debated. I myself favor the simplest explanation: the baby boom left too many young men uncivilized, because there weren’t enough adults to civilize them all, and it ended when the young men age-graded out of it, as almost all of them have historically done anyway.
African American men die at horrendous, unconscionable rates as they did in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Ie, before Bill Bratton, Paul Vallas and the Clinton crime bill and the “put 100,000 more police on the streets”
The decline in the homicide rate (which is the best thing to look at because the definition doesn’t differ in different parts of the U.S.) started dropping in 1991, three years before the Clinton bill, and continued to do so throughout the decade for a total of 26%, quite blind to the passage of the bill and the changes brought by it, with the exception of the “three strikes and you’re out” law (now to be called the “three strikes and you’re dead” law in the Age of COVID), which of course “works” in the same sense that the death penalty “works”: there can’t be street crime from people who can’t go into the streets.
I note, by the way, that at least 2500 inmates were released from Rikers Island (NYC’s jail for convicts with less-than-a-year sentences and the not-yet-tried who cannot make cash bail) and about an equal number not admitted in the first place. Of these, about 10% have been rearrested, a number that suggests (to me at least) massive over-incarceration.
a commonplace of European and elite American discourse – that American cities are too violent
Certainly any violent death is one too many. However: a commonplace it may be, but is it a true commonplace? The homicide rate in NYC (3.3) is about the same as Portland, Seattle, Honolulu — and Marseille. Vilnius has a homicide rate of 3.9, between Laredo (TX) and Madison (WI). Kaunas has the highest homicide rate (5.4) of any large city in the EU, more than Plano (TX), less than Colorado Springs. (I’m looking only at the 100 largest US cities by population here).
Yes, the US has 13 cities with homicide rates above 20, and that’s sad and scary. In decreasing order of rate, they are St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Kansas City (MO), Cleveland, Memphis, Newark (where I was born), Chicago, Cincinnati, Mobile, Philadelphia. There’s nothing like that outside Latin America and South Africa. But the magic of New York City is not a matter of its police department.
I myself favor the simplest explanation: the baby boom left too many young men uncivilized, because there weren’t enough adults to civilize them all, and it ended when the young men age-graded out of it, as almost all of them have historically done anyway.
Yes, it’s the spikes that need a special explanation, not the declines. It’s likely that the baby boom comes into it, but there were baby booms elsewhere without violent crime going through the roof. So what left the boys uncivilized? I’ve thought it could be families marred by untreated war trauma, but I don’t know enough about the demographics of war service and the availability of mental healthcare to know,
I’m not being played. I’ve been carefully analyzing murder rates for nearly 20 years, since noticing in my neighborhood the very night that Chicago adopted a test of aggressive policing in a single district, and wondering what was up. That district had its quietest month in 3.5 decades, and within another month, the old superintendent, who insisted “it can’t work in Chicago,” was ousted. Chicago’s murder rate fell by a quarter in the next year, as the tactics were brought citywide. And remained at that much lower plateau for more than a decade, until the city’s reaction to the Rialmo case led police to “go fetal”, backing away from engaging lest an honest mistake should lead to firing and prosecution. In the last month, the rate has skyrocketed again, as police feel more than ever that the city “doesn’t have their back.”
Whether this concern is legitimate is a separate question. My point is that the murder rate in Chicago has been very responsive to changes in aggressive engagement by police, not year over year in a city, a scale at which change is hard to attribute, but district by district, month by month.
By the way, for those interested in murder stats that aren’t cherry-picked, the US rate is 60% higher than Europe, and triple that of Canada. 26% of Canadian households own guns. “But what about Kaunas and Colorado Springs?” you ask. Dunno what the relevance may be. Ask John.
Seattle and Portland never had a significant murder issue. New York had one and solved it. Its murder rate is about one eighth of what it was when I graduated from college. Yes there was a small decline in 1991, as John says. Why? Well in 1990, 87 murders were attributed to a single arson, torching a residential building. Remove that case and the decline was 0.2%.
In 1992 there was a 6% decline, and the numbers held steady in 1993.
In 1994, Bratton took over, and the murder rate fell by more than 20%. And then again by more than 25% the following year. In two years, the murder rate went from 1,946 to 1,177. The following 3 years saw additional double-digit percentage declines.
So in the three years John cites as launching the decline, 1990-93, murder went down 2% per year, and didn’t even get below the 1989 rate. In the five years that saw increased police and Bratton’s accountability revolution, the rate went down by more than 20% per year, by the end of which, 1,300 fewer people were being killed each year, mostly African American men.
But I can’t blame John, because that weird 1991 idea is constantly touted by the innumerate ideologues who populate this debate, so you can’t avoid getting sucked in unless you immerse yourself in the numbers. It’s a political game, the starting point being a partisan desire to deny credit to Giuliani and give it to Dinkins, combined with an ideological desire to avoid crediting police. It was never Giuliani or Dinkins. It was Bratton, who reminded American police that they had a job to do, and held them accountable.
Only 4 major American cities saw declines even close to that scale in the 90s. Two of them were Boston, where the decline came in the Bratton years before he went to NYC, and Los Angeles, where the decline came in the years after Bratton left NY, and went west. And one was San Diego where there just weren’t that many murders.
But only NY really went on to solve the problem. New York virtually eliminated “cynical murder,’ where it’s in the interest of someone to convince someone else to kill a third party. (This is what never really existed, at scale, in Seattle, Portland or Honolulu.) Organizational murder, which remains common in Chicago. I witnessed such a discussion once, some scumbag leaning out the window of his late model car telling my neighbor’s kid “you oughta pop him, bang, bang, bang,” a day after one of his friends was slain. My neighbor, who came from a sort of fringe gang background himself, was a hero, sending his kid to Cleveland for a month till things cooled.
By contrast, 6 years ago,, the NYPD was trying to use predictive data to figure out which domestic incidents might lead to murder, and the Times explained that there were simply no other significant categories of murder to be brought down. Only crimes of passion were left.
The issue of violence in this country, the reason we’re different from other countries with similar economies, is primarily an issue of organized, cynical violence in the absence of effective policing, a result of the widespread abandonment of responsibility by the classes that populated urban bureaucracies in the late 60s, in reaction to the riots. I still heard, and bristled at, the catch phrases when I began working in government in Chicago in 1990, people anchoring their refusal to care in the memory of the riots. In 1966, the US, particularly in northern states, wasn’t much more violent than Europe. But when police abrogated their responsibility, the murder rate skyrocketed, as cynical murder became lucrative and common, for decades. It still is in too many parts of Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and many other cities.
Lead.
A few years ago I saw a map of New Orleans showing both the amount of traffic on the streets and the amount of violent crime. The correlation is scary. Europe outlawed lead in gasoline earlier than the US, and never used quite as much gasoline to begin with.
The problem with grand monocausal theories about the nationwide rise and drop in homicide (I blame the baby boom! I blame leaded gasoline!) is that they struggle to account for stark regional differences in both the absolute homicide rate and the rate of change since the Bad Old Days. So to pick 1991, when NYC was down modestly (perhaps just due to that one arson mass killling) to 14.2/100,000 from 14.5 the prior year, Chicago (where I lived at the time) was at 33/100,000, before peaking at 34 the following year. But Chicago’s decline has been much shallower (still above 20 as of the year whose data JC was citing above, although maybe it dipped below 20 for calendar 2019) over the subsequent time period, so the ratio of Chicago-murders:NYC-murders has continued to become more skewed in Chicago’s disfavor, to the extent that in recent years Chicago has typically had more murders in absolute numbers than NYC (i.e. w/o adjusting for population), which was certainly not the case in the 1990’s.
Interestingly enough, however, from my POV early ’90’s Chicago felt subjectively less out-of-control and dystopian than NYC as of the same time (even though I moved from the latter to the former in ’92), although that was probably an artifact of the way in which Chicago succeeded, if that’s the right word, in keeping its most extreme crime more strictly confined (segregated, you might say …) to the highest-crime neighborhoods where I didn’t spend much time, whereas in NYC the subjective sense of hovering menace/chaos/etc leaked over into the “nice” parts of Manhattan even though for actual homicides you had the same extreme internal skew in distribution by neighborhoods. That had radically changed by the late ’90’s, along with a lot of the more “colorful” character of pre-Giuliani NYC. Some point around 1998 I walked from the Astor Place subway station to an upscale new restaurant on rapidly-gentrifying Avenue B and realized with some shock upon my arrival at my destination that not a single person had tried to sell me dope as I walked along the sidewalk, whereas five years earlier that route through that neighborhood might have been expected to result in maybe 8 to 10 such solicitations, maybe more …
So what left the boys uncivilized?
Well, now you get into deeper historical questions and that fuzzy thing called “national character”. But to stick to the obvious, Europe’s governments disarmed and repressed their people for a long time and then liberalized and democratized, by which time people had mostly gotten out of the habit of settling problems by private violence. Governments were weaker in Italy and weakest in Southern Italy, so violence is higher there because the new habits never completely took.
In the U.S. we can look at failures of cohesion and failures of policing (another lecture from Doctor Obviosus):
1) Governments were liberal and democratic at a time when private arms were still absolutely necessary. In New England and the Midwest, there was more homogeneity and more social cohesion (not an unmixed blessing, that) and people mostly repressed themselves, using violence on a large scale only against Natives.
2) The South developed a “culture of honor”, one of those hellish ideas people come up with when cohesion and policing are both low, and of course a slave society requires private arms from its beginning to its end, as well as their frequent use. It’s damned hard to enslave adult males in large quantities even when the economics seem to require it. Of course the enslaved caught the culture-of-honor virus too.
3) The West was the Wild West because nobody bothered to police it on the necessary scale. (The Canadian West was fundamentally different because the civilizing forces of the school, the church, the cops, and the women arrived at the frontier basically at the same time as the men.)
But when all has been said, toddlers are wild animals, and we have to civilize them one brain at a time. That doesn’t work if their parents aren’t very civilized either.
But what about Kaunas and Colorado Springs?
My point was to debunk the notion that “American cities are too violent”, as if it applied to all of them (or all except NYC) and to no EU cities. Neither is true. European intellectuals are no more immune to matching to type than anyone else.
Chicago adopted a test of aggressive policing in a single district, […]. That district had its quietest month in 3.5 decades
That is indeed impressive, but it’s awfully fast, and I wonder about the Hawthorne effect.
Seattle and Portland never had a significant murder issue
ORLY? In 1999 the murder rate in Seattle was about 8.2 and in Portland just short of 7. That’s less than NYC’s 9.0, to be sure, but not that much less. And of course none of them compare with the Big Bads like Baltimore, which had 40 then and 52 now.
So in the three years John cites as launching the decline, 1990-93
I was actually talking about the U.S. murder rate at that point, not NYC’s; sorry for being unclear. It declined quite smoothly from 9.3 in 1999 to 5.5 in 2000, and there weren’t Brattons everywhere. A spike in 2001, not surprisingly, and then steady decline again.
The correlation is scary.
Yes, but what’s the effect size? NYC uses as much gas per capita (before coronavirus) as the country as a whole did in 1920, and we had no miraculous differential in IQ here.
I don’t know about lead, but road noise makes it hard to think straight.
Other such cases are roughly Albania + Kosovo, and the Caucasus.
Can’t remember.
AFAIK, lead is supposed to make aggressive/uninhibited, not to depress the IQ.
Certainly, but it didn’t decline until March or April of this year, did it?
There might be a causative relation between traffic density and road noise, even in a state of snafu (before March, we are now in fubar). So if violent crime correlates with one, it correlates with the other.
Also when did unleaded fuel become mandatory? There’s an easy control for the first hypothesis.
I’ve seen the correlation with traffic. If poisoning or noise plays a part, it will be difficult to control for socio-economic factors. If you have a choice you live somewhere else.
I agree that it’s not one simple cause, and I didn’t mean that there are only the secular fall in violence that matters. It probably takes complex and shifting policies. Violent behavior is rational when you can rationally expect society to be violent. Crime can be rational, letting your neighbourhood decay can be rational. It all depends on expectations. Policy to change people’s expectations is about credibly promising to produce results counter to past experience. You change expectations of inflation by raising the interest rate until people take the message. Then you lower it to allow new growth and avoid unnecessary damage. You change expectations of recession by raising public spending until people trust that business will continue. Then you pull back temporary spending to avoid inflation. But these are simple cases. To get rid of violence and crime you need to change expectations on many areas, and what is correct in the initial phases may very well be counterproductive in the long run.
I think there answers to some of these things (like the leaded fuel study, which excluded NY and 2 other jurisdictions accounting for more than 1/3rd of the decline over the years studied, for inscrutable reasons), but in keeping with my initial point, I’m interested in hearing these perspectives rather than continuing to blither.
Writing this comment mostly to acknowledge the points being made.
>it’s awfully fast, and I wonder about the Hawthorne effect.
Let me try to understand the objection. You’re concerned that in a setting of increased policing, it’s possible that perpetators decide not to commit crimes because they’re aware of greater police scrutiny?
Perhaps I’ve broken my commitment from the post above. But I’ll keep quiet now.
I suppose bubble tea came to New York too late to be associated with any downturn in crime.
a commonplace of European and elite American discourse – that American cities are too violent
This has not been a commonplace in either European or elite American discourse for several decades. The decline in crime in the US beginning in the 1990s has been widely remarked upon everywhere. Indeed, until this year the commonplace in conservative American (and Polish and Russian) circles was that it was Western Europe that was now more dangerous, what with the terrorism, the acid attacks in London, the “no-go zones”, the grooming gangs, the scary immigrants molesting women at will, etc., etc. Trump was elected to prevent America from following Europe down the slippery slope towards Sharia law if I recall. So Mission Accomplished I guess.
Subjectively I have been hopping back and forth between Boston and Vienna for a decade and Boston doesn’t feel particularly dangerous in terms of major crime even compared to “safe” European cities like Zürich or Vienna. To be honest I have experienced or heard anecdotally about a lot more minor theft, muggings, and other annoyances in Vienna. Philadelphia on the other hand…
@Vanya: Boston is a very heavily economically segregated city, and that affects the crime a lot. There are places where I would completely safe going alone in the middle of the night (like Back Bay), but it’s not too far from there to the South End, which is still downright scary sometimes.
You’re concerned that in a setting of increased policing, it’s possible that perpetators decide not to commit crimes because they’re aware of greater police scrutiny?
Plainly I was thinking of something else, but I no longer know what. However, my understanding is that no public acknowledgement had been made, and it seems hardly likely that additional police could have been hired and trained so quickly (though they might have been transferred, I suppose).
lead is supposed to make aggressive/uninhibited, not to depress the IQ.
Both. A study in NZ of people born in Dunedin NZ in 1972-73, during the heyday of leaded gasoline, showed that the people with 10 or more µg/dl of lead were about 5 IQ points lower than their nonleaded peers. This isn’t a very big effect, since the standard error of measurement is between 2 and 3 IQ points, but it’s there.
Subjectively I have been hopping back and forth between Boston and Vienna for a decade
Whereas objectively you have remained in Grand Rapids MI (murder rate 2.45) the whole time, I suppose.
This has not been a commonplace in either European or elite American discourse for several decades. The decline in crime in the US beginning … Western Europe that was now more dangerous, what with the terrorism, the acid attacks in London, the “no-go zones”, the grooming gangs, the scary immigrants molesting women at will, etc…Mission Accomplished I guess.
This is simply not true. Even the American gov. doesn’t think Europe’s cities are as dangerous as America’s. Just read the OSAC Reports on Crime & Safety for the UK:
Maybe of interest only to me, because I live here, is Norway (“Norway is a very peaceful nation”), where the causes for concern for American visitors seem to be pickpockets, roadworks, flooding and landslides – but you can read similar things about other big cities in Europe.
As for European discourse, here’s this week’s Economist: The violence In American cities reflects the fury of polarisation.
And just for good measure, next to one about how Police shot an LA security guard in the back five times, here’s yesterday’s Guardian schadenfreude-du-jour about how New York is being overcome by hungry rats. Take that, Trump.
This has not been a commonplace in either European or elite American discourse for several decades. […] This is simply not true. Even the American gov. doesn’t think Europe’s cities are as dangerous as America’s.
The first claim is about perceptions, the second about facts on the ground. (Stand by to come about!) There is no doubt that large U.S. cities have higher homicide rates on the whole than large EU cities do, (Ready about!) though I was at pains to point out the fairly small overlap above. (Helm’s a-lee!) But what the intellectuals are making of it all is a whole different story.
I thought I had told Hannah Arendt’s story about Eisenhower’s election in 1956 here, but Dr. Google is not being helpful today. All the European intellectuals in New York began to pack their bags to return to Europe: they knew what it meant when a general was elected, or “elected”. Fortunately, most of them had American friends who knew some history and could reassure them that of the 32 men who had been presidents, no less than 11 (beginning with Washington) had been generals, all of whom left the White House peacefully when their terms were over, and so would Eisenhower. And so he did. Such are the uses not only of history, but of quantitative reasoning.
The violence In American cities reflects the fury of polarisation
The author of this article has some very strange notions about what political means. He speaks of the “politicisation of protests”; what protests does he have in mind that were not political ab initio both to the protesters and the protestees? The same with “Demonstrating against police brutality has become political and ideological, not just racial”: say what? Police brutality demonstrations have always been the first two, and only situationally the third.
Indeed, the term was invented in Britain in 1848 and was said to be pervasive there and then, and was first applied in the U.S. to union suppression among mostly-white workers in 1872. The 1960s civil rights movement in the U.S. talked about it constantly — that’s when I first heard of it — and that was a well-integrated affair, involving beatings of whites, blacks, Natives, and Sidney Morgenbesser (who said his beating was unjust but not unfair, because everyone else was being beaten too).
It’s also worth noticing that the article is datelined June 2, when it was not yet abundantly clear that the looting and smashing was ordinary (and very well organized) commercial burglary done while the police were distracted by overreacting to actual protesters from their job of catching criminals (or so much as seeing crimes in progress for what they were). They were in no sense an overflow of rage among protestors, though there were of course a few such incidents.
The author of this article has some very strange notions about what political means
Exactly.
I’d say too that “polarisation” is often used in a strikingly mealy-mouthed way, to imply a sort of moral equivalence between race-baiting authoritarian friends of billionaires on the one hand, and normal decent human beings on the other. Only one of the major US political parties has disappeared off the map into frank extremism.
Yup. It’s amazing (well, not exactly amazing, but depressing) to see how eagerly people seize on any violence associated with protests to call the protestors “rioters” and angrily denounce their cause. The violence associated with the police and military, on the other hand, is cheerfully accepted as in the order of things.
Eisenhower’s election in 1956
1952.
of the 32 men who had been presidents, no less than 11 (beginning with Washington) had been generals
That reminds me of the Duke of Wellington, writing to his brother
The elite, however defined, might know better, but it’s not hard to find Faux Noise viewers – or Faux Noise show hosts – who are completely convinced Europe’s more famous cities have been taken over by marauding, raping & pillaging hordes of Syrian Muslims. Not limited to the US either; there are plenty of Russian TV viewers with the same beliefs.
No, this is mere ignorance about what is political and what, if anything, is not political in the US.
(Whether someone in that situation should write a newspaper article about the US is another question.)
There’s a story about Truman giving some advice to Eisenhower when he became president: You will discuss matters with your cabinet and advisers, formulate plans, issue instructions — and nothing will happen.
JC, as they say, forgot about American politics more than I ever knew, but there is a narrow sense of “political” in American discourse which means “something to do with elections”. In that sense, making something political means using it to get elected. Polarization is a well-documented trend in American politics, to a degree that it can be discussed without moral indignation.
I also remember someone saying that if the (US) president wants anything done he (maybe if this pronoun becomes obsolete thing will change) must demand it three times.
“Governance rests on the consent of the government”.
Yes, but is an Economist article, even about American politics, a part of American political discourse? This one doesn’t read that way to me at all.
JC, as they say, forgot about American politics more than I ever knew
I have been working hard to increase my ignorance in this matter.
I have been working hard to increase my ignorance in this matter
Gambatte. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
You will discuss matters with your cabinet and advisers, formulate plans, issue instructions — and nothing will happen.
Something closely related to this appears to be an “anthropological constant”. When people have observed that you know what you’re doing, they ask for your advice. You explain how you see the matter in question, state what you would do – and nothing happens,. Except they accuse you of “not showing respect” for them by having opinions.
Apparently the problem is that these people want to be asked for their opinion, even when they have volunteered none and, when you then do ask for their opinion, have none to give.
I discovered a wonderful German word recently, almost too good to be true: Pleonexie. According to Duden, one of its meanings (apart from “greed”) is: Drang, trotz mangelnder Sachkenntnis überall mitzureden.
Indeed so wonderful that I wonder if it’s an easter egg.
I’m pretty sure it was laid there by a fun-loving bunny like the one in Donnie Darko. But how did it breach the defenses of lexicography, one of the bastions of civilization ?
This is simply not true. Even the American gov. doesn’t think Europe’s cities are as dangerous as America’s.
Of course it’s not true. But I think Ryan’s perception of public perception is a few decades out of date. More Americans, including a surprising number of “elites”, take direction from Fox News and social media than from the US Gov (aka “Deep State”, as they would say).
Not limited to the US either
Certainly not. Polish state media has also convinced half of Poland that any woman walking around Paris, Brussels, Berlin or Cologne will be sexually assaulted immediately. David may also remember that at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Austrian tabloids were awash with stories of refugees raping and pillaging defenceless Austrian girls. Vienna was becoming a no-go zone. As soon as Kurz became Bundeskanzler those stories almost magically disappeared, and Vienna once again became the safest city in Europe.
Apologies, Vanya. Despite the clarity of your writing, I’d misunderstood your point.
I wasn’t in the country. All I got to hear was wir schaffen das and Merkel muss weg. 🙂
(…and one story that was fake but was breathlessly spread by Russian media in Germany, leading to scenes reminiscent of that pizza place in DC that doesn’t have a basement.)
@JC: I have been working hard to increase my ignorance in this matter.
Obligatory LeGuin quote:
Exactly the quotation I had in mind.
Violent criminal confrontations and the use of weapons are still relatively rare
I missed this before. Still implies that an increase is coming as sure as eggs is eggs, which of course there is no reason to believe — quite the opposite.
The word still is excellent for such implicatures. Here’s Shakespeare being interrogated by Baltasar Guzmán, an intelligence officer of the Spanish military occupation in London. Lope de Vega, the playwright and Guzmán’s subordinate, is translating. The occasion is that Lope has just killed Christopher Marlowe, wanted for undoubted buggery and suspected treason, outside Shakespeare’s lodging-house in an attempt to arrest him.
And so they question him — but they do not put him to the question, and that winds up making all the difference.
The word still is excellent for such implicatures.
How considerate of you to spare us the G-word !
Well, didn’t Mr. G— get shown up as a hopelessly belated imitator in this very hattery a few days back? You need never fear the name again!
I haven’t been following along at home recently. At the moment I need every ounce of energy to combat the forces of Unreason, viz. stubborn programmers of a certain age. I’m winning, of course, but it’s a war of attrition.
I’m lost. What G-word? Which Mr. G? Surely not Señor Capitán Guzman.
The author of the above passage is a Mr. T.
Grice.
Oh, I see. I don’t associate implicature with Grice or Gricean any more.
Dare I hope that particular outbreak of verbal flux has abated ? Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition ! Who knows what new popular pomposity will next strike.
I actually first learned of the concept as ‘conversational implicature,’ I think. But it’s a thing that kids learn to use soon enough, my impression is that Grice was able to express the idea in terms that other philosophers deigned to take notice of and thus arrogated the credit.
Nobody expected this lack of Spanish inquisition!
This would have been the secular question rather than either the Spanish or the English Inquisition’s. Shakespeare was suspected of treason rather than heresy (or buggery).
I’m visiting my hometown in Bulgaria, and some friends’ kids were playing around us in the garden this afternoon. They’re in primary school. One of them asked another if they’ve heard of “bubble tea” (in English), and translated it as “бълбукащ чай” (balbukasht chai), “bubbling tea” in Bulgarian. Turns out in my small hometown of ~30 thousand there’s a bubble tea place. The kid’s mother told me he found it himself and took her there, and she hadn’t heard of bubble tea before. In her words “it took what felt like half an hour to make it”.
Good lord! How do these things take over the world?
I blame the internets.
And no sooner do I mention buggery but the very next comment is about Bulgaria, and the two words are a doublet! It is indeed, as DE is wont to say, all meant.
I think it’s interesting that the Times Magazine’s letters have completely changed. I hadn’t paid close attention over the last couple weeks, but this morning, only a couple of the letters are fawning in the style that virtually every letter had been for more than a year. They published a few substantive criticisms, including one that gets to the heart of my complaint – that their descriptions of conservative people, organizations and ideas are often inaccurate, distorted and unfair. I doubt it had anything to do with anyone there reading the exchange above, but I do feel vindicated.
I also want to call attention to Eric Zorn, a Trib columnist who is generally quite liberal, writing in the Trib this week about the Kenosha shootings.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/eric-zorn/ct-column-rittenhouse-kenosha-self-defense-zorn-20200903-susvsg45yndn7pb67l42ywnzn4-story.html
I find the trend of people bringing weapons to protests horrifying, think the idea of a 17-year old wandering alone and armed through volatile streets extremely disturbing.
And yet, I watched the videos of what happened, and it was clear that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense after trying very hard to get out of the situation without shooting. I was dismayed by a week of straight media blandly calling him a white supremacist murderer with any compunction for the actual facts of the case — Josh Marshall, who I respect and whose blog I subscribe, guffawing. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, writing from the flyover ether despite being close enough that they should have known the ground truth was different.
Zorn restored some of my faith, apparently being willing to listen to those who dissented from the mainstream perspective on what happened, and actually look into the facts of the case. We need more like that, more attention to the dissenting letters to the editor, if we’re going to climb out of the crevasse we’re falling into and build a bridge across it.
I’m glad you feel that way. (I think of you every time I read the letters section!)
It’s not “horrifying”. It’s a death threat.
It sends a very clear message: “If I’m feeling cross, I’m perfectly capable of murdering you. Just so you know.”
AFAIK, all of that was after he had shot the first person.
But even otherwise, can you really make a case that his life was threatened? Because if not, he had no right to shoot. Over here, you’re allowed to kill people in immediate self-defense and in immediate defense of others, and that’s it.
…Does Wisconsin have a stand-your-ground law?
Zorn restored some of my faith
Zorn = rage. Cf. Sloterdijk’s book Zorn und Zeit.
Has he done a sequel Sein und Zorn?
It wouldn’t fit his thesis, which is (as I murkily recall) that societies have developed rage banks where people can invest and live off the interest (that’s where time comes in – over time you get madder and madder). Rage banks are only mental institutions, of course. They don’t have postal addresses or URLs.
Sloterdijk writes lucid prose on murky matters. Reading him is more an acquired habit than an acquired taste.
“In soccer you can rid yourself of most of the aggression you build up in soccer.”
– Ephraim Kishon
>AFAIK, all of that was after he had shot the first person.
That you would be wrong on a simple point of fact, easily observable on video, is completely understandable. Your “AFAIK” is honest. You’re following the narrative of media you trust.
That reporters and pundits repeat that falsehood is pretty unforgivable. And should make you question the degree of trust you place.
Please watch the videos if you have any doubt in the facts I’m about to present.
The “first person” chased Rittenhouse for at least 50 yards, while he ran away as fast as he could trying to avoid the fight. Only when he found himself in a corner, and heard a gunshot behind him, weirdly fired into the air by someone else, did he turn and, finding his pursuer nearly upon him, shoot.
It’s not clear why the man chased Rittenhouse. There are fascinating hints in the videos of that evening for those who want to pursue it. They offer a pretty high hurdle for those who claim that rioting is “just damage to property”. But that’s a side issue.
That Rittenhouse was being pursued by an angry hothead looking to do him violence is not in dispute by anyone honest and informed. Whether he tried very hard to avoid that conflict is also not in dispute by honest observers.
It’s so clear that I’d think your line “if I were cross” was gaslighting if I thought you’d bothered to inform yourself.
But here is the important point, because this isn’t about Rittenhouse. It’s about media with a Rittenhouse narrative that is counter to easily proven fact. Imagine yourself a sane conservative, someone who thinks Trump is corrupt and incompetent. You’re someone who believes in some but not all elements of the traditional Republican platform. Maybe you’re covid-sane, and it has you considering your news sources. You turn to mainstream media to see what they have to say, whether they may offer you more sanity than Trump and his folks. But you’ve seen the video of Kenosha, which is pretty easy to find. So you actually know what happened. And then you read the paper of record for eastern Wisconsin, and find the Journal-Sentinel spouting the same factually incorrect line “he was only running away after he shot someone.” About one of the major outrages of the day, which occurred 30 miles from their HQ, in a town where they have subscribers. And of course, it’s the same line touted or at least implied by virtually every mainstream media article about the incident.
I think that person’s reaction has to be the same as yours and mine to Fox News – “Meh, they lie for politics! Even when there is video proving them wrong! How could I trust them on anything?”
Did the Journal-Sentinel lie? Did Josh Marshall lie? I doubt it. Did they accept at face value a version that seemed to serve their narrative? And refuse to listen to anyone who said otherwise, because “they’re just evil, lying right wingers!” That seems most likely. But it really has to be one or the other. Either they are dishonest or they were unwilling to inform themselves. I guess there’s a third possibility – that their ideological cocoons are so well insulated that they had no idea anyone could believe differently.
People and media on both sides are hyping their friends and partisans into hatred via outrage largely on the basis of falsehoods. Did the left-wing Portland shooter feel threatened in part because he’d read lies about what happened in Kenosha? It was surely on his mind. Each round of lies pushes people further from each other.
It’s the outcome of trusting news sources that refuse to let counter-narrative facts seep in. Of trusting your partisan instincts and relying on news that comforts you that those instincts are right. That’s why I object fiercely to outlets with policies like the Times Mag letter policy, and why I’m glad it seems to have been overturned.
@ryan
I am not sure you are answering D.M’s points. I would say that a person who wants to show support for the police should attend a protest of like-minded people, and should not “carry”, when he does. If he attends a protest of people he disagrees with, and “carries” (“for his own protection”), it seems to me he is looking for a fight and prepared to employ deadly violence in the course of that fight.Of course, his age should be taken into account and his parents should be investigated to see if they need help keeping their son out of trouble, or if they are “egging him on” and hence accessories to his actions.
I should perhaps make explicit that I’m not talking about the NY Times’s letter policy.
So, that’s not on the video? How, then, does the video contradict the narrative that young Rittenhouse was being chased because he had just shot someone?
Please post links.
Even so, was his life in danger? Because if not, he had no right to shoot.
I’m completely serious. Open carrying is a threat; that’s what its whole point is. That alone doesn’t mean it’s automatically unjustified; I’m not saying all police should be unarmed at all times, for example – and some states have extended this to private citizens with a permit, even if not to 17-year-old Rittenhouse. So far, so good. Open carrying to a protest means to bring Chekhov’s gun. It is an unambiguous message: “if I feel I should, I will kill people – try to guess what would get me to that point!”
His mother drove him and his gun there from another state.
Can we please not argue about this? Everybody’s made their positions clear, and nobody’s going to convince anybody else.
I find the entrenched division into “left” and “right”, where nobody is willing to listen to the other side’s narrative and everyone is basing their judgements purely on “point of view” or “political stance”, terrifying. It’s what breeds dishonesty on both sides. Nobody believes what the other side is saying because “they’re sure to be lying” based on their political stance.
I’d still appreciate links to the videos, though, even if I won’t discuss them here. 🙂
David,
I’ll answer on the theory that my link will likely send this to moderation, where our host can block it if he prefers. Or cut it off after the citation of the videos. (By the way, the Zorn article I linked to had links to most of this.)
One good place to find the videos with some context is this Twitter thread from Christiaan Triebert, a NY Times Visual Investigations reporter, formerly of the European anti-fascist, but by no means antifa, Bellingcat. For whatever reason, Triebert’s thread does a much better job of giving a fairly complete story than was done by the Times Visual Investigations team in their story. I have my sense of why that would be true:
https://twitter.com/trbrtc/status/1298839097923063809
It’s definitely worth following to the end, because he adds significant new finds a few days later.
The most useful videos, which Triebert is excerpting, come from KoerriElijah (long form facebook live), ReggInkagnedo (I think this was also FB, but maybe not) and Richie McGinnis (a reporter for a right wing website who had his camera on much of the time). These are googleable or can be found on YouTube. KoerriElijah kept his FB live running for hours. He was at the gas station when Rittenhouse ran past with a fire extinguisher, and hearing that there were cars at the “other car lot” he followed. He seems to be on a scooter, because he passes people walking, including Rittenhouse, and interestingly, Rosenbaum (the first person shot). Rosenbaum had earlier gotten into one of those chest-beating, friends-holding-him-back confrontations at the gas station, because he was trying to push a flaming dumpster into police lines and someone extinguished it, all on video. One of the people who is the target of this self-righteous ire (because who would not be self-righteous about having their dumpster fire extinguished) is dressed in a shirt about the same color green as that of Rittenhouse, and also carrying a long gun, details that may be relevant.
When KoerriElijah passes Rosenbaum, he has paused with a group who are lighting a new trash fire. Elijah makes sardonic comment, noting of the next trash can rolled out to be lit that the residents “are gonna need that to put their trash out tomorrow.” Elijah reaches the car lot, notes a car on fire, then turns his camera back towards where he had come from.
Meanwhile, Rich McGinnis had interviewed Rittenhouse. Like Elijah, McGinnis sees Rittenhouse heading towards the car lot and follows. McGinnis pauses a couple times, so he falls behind, but he is close enough to Rittenhouse and Rosenbaum that when they start running, it’s visible. If it were daylight, we could track Rittenhouse the entire time on this camera, but by night, there isn’t enough light to see him much of the time during this walk. He is intermittently visible, and just seems to be walking along.
Both cameras are always within earshot. That’s how we know there is no previous shooting – there’s no sound of gunfire, little noise, no reaction from anyone nearby. There are dozens of witnesses to this scene. Interestingly, there doesn’t even seem to be much yelling or confrontation. McGinnis describes it in an interview as Rosenbaum seeming to edge closer to Rittenhouse, then taking off after him.
At any rate, both McGinnis and KoerriElijah catch the scene of Rosenbaum pursuing Rittenhouse on camera. It’s no short run. I would guess it at 50-plus yards. As they get halfway across the car lot, bizarrely, someone else raises a handgun and fires into the sky. Rittenhouse seems to hear this and maybe to realize he’s run into a bit of a dead-end. He turns to find Rosenbaum is basically on top of him, lunging at him. He shoots once into the ground and 3 times towards Rosenbaum. McGinnis has followed them, and by now is within a few yards immediately behind, and in the line of fire. He reports feeling some sort of shrapnel hit his leg.
To this point, everything I’ve mentioned is simply verifiable fact. I think it will be very hard to get a conviction on this basis. Rittenhouse makes a very strong effort to get away. Earlier, he began running with the fire extinguisher, but quickly slowed to a walk, suggesting he may not be in shape to sprint more than 50 yards. It’s going to be hard to convince a jury he was bloodthirsty when he ran out of darkness, where he might have shot with impunity, into a brightly lit car lot. There is just no way around the fact that when confronted with someone violently angry at him, he does not shoot. He runs away.
I suppose one could differ at the degree of danger, and the level of force he used in reaction. At minimum, any honest account must acknowledge that he was being attacked, and that his first effort was not to shoot, but to try very hard to get out of the confrontation. That Rosenbaum was formidable. And that Rosenbaum was persistent.
There are a couple suppositions that I find interesting, stemming from how little noise we hear before the chase. It’s interesting to think about the green-shirted man, the target of Rosenbaum’s anger at the gas station. Might Rosenbaum have thought an hour later on Sheridan Rd. that he’d caught his antagonist alone? Second, might Rittenhouse not even known why he was being chased. And, though I haven’t found him in any of the extensive video of the gas station confrontation, it would be unsurprising if Rittenhouse had witnessed some of Rosenbaum’s belligerence there, and recognized that he was angry beyond self-control.
Rittenhouse had no way of knowing that Rosenbaum wasn’t armed. Indeed, one of the three people Rittenhouse shot 45 seconds later, as they attacked him, was brandishing a handgun.
Another of the attackers in the second wave had stood alongside Rosenbaum in the gas station confrontation over putting out the dumpster fire. Given that Rittenhouse runs back the way he and Rosenbaum had come, still no more than a minute from when Rosenbaum first attacked, and that his new pursuers had to be along this route, it seems likely that the guy was still accompanying Rosenbaum as he took off on his fateful run at Rittenhouse, and so knew that Rosenbaum was attacking Rittenhouse, and knew Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
One bit of editorializing – these guys seem very willing to defend their right to commit arson (“but it’s only a crime against property!”) with not just the threat of violence, but with actual violence.
By the way, I don’t support open carry. I’m fine with gun control though it’s not a priority to me, and I think Rittenhouse, far from a hero, was an idiot who shouldn’t have been there, and definitely shouldn’t have been alone on a street at midnight.
Thanks, I’ll watch as soon as possible (scarily busy currently). Just two off-topic things for now:
1) One link doesn’t trigger moderation. It used to be two (or editing a comment with one link), and now it’s six.
2) “Rittenhouse had no way of knowing that Rosenbaum wasn’t armed.” If you have to assume that everyone is armed until proven otherwise, I have no words.
OK, links and thoughts have been posted; I’d really appreciate it if any further discussion were taken to e-mail (or the social media platform of your choice). Thanks!
For me, the issue is now moot.
I’m reading Taibo’s magisterial biography of Villa, in the intro to which he describes trying to disentangle Villa’s life from the tangle of lies of those who defeated him and the legends passed down with oral exaggeration by his friends. He writes that even the photographic record was maintained for partisan reasons, so it offers fewer clues to the man than one might hope.
I had really thought that the question here could be clarified by the video, that most people would agree if they knew what actually happened. I was skeptical of Hat’s suggestion that positions were hardened and no one could convince anyone.
I now know I was wrong. I had written that Rittenhouse might not have known whether the man chasing him through the dark had a weapon. The reply is much more clarifying than any video could be.:
>If you have to assume that everyone is armed until proven otherwise, I have no words.
Fair enough. Maybe this is adequate summary of the whole issue. This is where we diverge. You see “everyone” and “angry stranger, whose friend was in fact carrying a handgun, chasing someone for 50 yards at midnight, in a context where stray shots are ringing out” as a distinction without a difference.
I don’t think I’m being unfair. Am I, David? I’m not trying to be. That really seems like an adequate description. You were responding directly to my characterization of Rosenbaum during the chase, my suggestion that this particular person, acting with extreme belligerence, might have been armed. You gloss it as “everyone.”
Upthread, you had already expressed skepticism that Rosenbaum’s pursuit created a credible fear of grievous bodily harm or death. I had thought the question was based on a lack of understanding of what Rosenbaum did. But you now know, and still maintain that he was so far from a credible threat that the idea renders you speechless.
I’m far less sanguine about the intents and capabilities of people who pursue others in the dark of night where shots are already ringing out.
Your beliefs are likely consistent. I no longer have reason to think the videos could change your mind.
I still believe that many people’s views on such questions are colored by their understanding of which person was allied with them politically. I’ve seen it in the online reactions to the Portland and Kenosha shootings. I would love to show people videos of those shootings, swapping the political identities of the shooters, to test the degree to which partisan leaning shapes judgment.
I do know that some people formed judgments on the basis of media misrepresentation, because when I pointed them to the Triebert thread in social media, they changed their minds. That was actually the basis for my attempting to raise the issue here. But they clearly must have shared my sense that angry, sustained pursuit by a stranger on a dark street in a violent setting is sufficient signal of violent intent. I now know that that belief is not universal.
Do keep in mind that I changed the topic. I still haven’t found the time to watch the videos, and therefore chose to respond to another point.
Yes, Rittenhouse couldn’t be sure that Rosenbaum wasn’t carrying a gun. This fact exposes a problem that goes much deeper than these two people or even the whole situation with the protests of the last few months. That’s another topic, but it’s so striking and so easy to point out that I did that.
Uh… of course it’s a sufficient signal of violent intent, and it licenses a violent defense.
It does not license a deadly defense.
…in the abstract. The fact – again: fact – that Rittenhouse had to fear Rosenbaum was going to escalate to an assault on his life can easily be argued to, uh, complicate things.
The old Weekly World News is out of business now, and I miss it. Week after week as I used to stand in line at Safeway, that was the paper that filled me in on the latest (with pictures too!) about Hitler, who happens to be alive on the bottom of the ocean in the wreck of the Titanic. I guess I could buy Alex Jones nutritional supplements as a pis-aller, but the experience probably won’t be as satisfying. I even got a blogpost out of the Weekly World News.
https://jonathanmorse.blog/2015/06/12/asks-air-silence-seeks-sign/
But now there’s this thread on Languagehat!
I remember Bat Boy!
Also, fair warning: I am going to delete any further comments on the Rittenhouse matter. You’ve both had your say, and you both want to have the last word, and it’s aggravating me, and enough is enough.
Please do! The guy hasn’t even gone to trial yet, and thanks to the magic of the Internet, we’re already approaching the baroqueness of JFK assassination theories. Let’s just watch the trial proceedings.
And now for something completely different. It says cautiously in Wikipedia that:
I’m thinking there were others who just weren’t recorded, this is about founding the first American paper mill.
During the last year of his life he lived in an unusual, solid-looking house, the Claus Rittenhouse house.
In his will there’s a Claus Rittenhouse House Clause.
I’m more interested in the anglicization of the name, per the wiki piece allegedly Rettinghaus or Rittinghaus back in Germany but then altered to Rittenhuysen during a sojourn in the Netherlands before coming to Pennsylvania. Commemorated today in a well-regarded brand of rye whiskey with no actual connection to anyone bearing the surname (the Kentucky distillers wanted an evocative-of-Pennsylvania name for marketing-image purposes). https://www.thewhiskeyshelf.com/rittenhouse-rye-review/
evocative-of-Pennsylvania name for marketing-image purposes
There’s a WC Fields Whiskey too. They may have been desperate. Better to market Alaskan vodka.
In his will there’s a Claus Rittenhouse House Clause.
I think you mean “In his will a Claus Rittenhouse House Clause is written.”
Comment deleted. Seriously, no more. Take it to e-mail. Thanks!
My two favorite Weekly World News were “Alien Baby Found on Mt. Everest//Has no heart, lungs, stomach, or kidneys, and lights fires with its eyes”; and one from the 1991 Gulf War about the Air Force piloting a flying saucer (erroneously called a “UFO” in the hed) against the Iraqis. The latter story I remember because it was the only time I ever read inside the Weekly World News; my journalism teacher brought a copy in for the class to look at. Accompanying the actual story was an image; it was a standard press photo of George Bush at a Rose Garden event, but they had whited out Barbara and claimed she was an alien visitor the president was meeting with.
I have a picture of a 2003 title page of the Weekly World News, from just before Bush kicked the weapons inspectors out of Iraq. It shows us Saddam’s real secret weapons: genetically modified KILLER DINOSAURS straight out of Jurassic Park.
Uh, if anybody wants to continue that other discussion, find my e-mail address in Google Scholar. I can’t promise I’ll reply quickly, though.
I’m trying to come up with a combination of a tyrannosaurus joke with, “This is Tyranny Hall,” but it’s not quite coming to me.