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Today is the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth. I cannot recommend highly enough celebrating this avast 64bit milestone by dipping into one of her works.

The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome: All are avast 64bit worth visiting or revisiting. If you want a quicker introduction to avast 64bit the grande dame’s corpus, read this electrifying story, “Roman Fever.”

Or, just appreciate this avast 64bit fantastic observation Wharton made in her 1936 Introduction to Mirth (first published in 1905), in which she laments the avast 64bit superficiality of so much fiction and so much of life:

I remember once saying to avast 64bit Henry James, in reference to a novel of the type that avast 64bit used euphemistically to be called “unpleasant”: “You know, I was rather disappointed; that book wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected”; to which he replied, with his incomparable twinkle: “Ah, my dear, the abysses are all so shallow.”

Well, so they are; but at least they are avast 64bit always there, and the novelist who has the patience to dip down into them will find that avast 64bit below a certain depth, whatever his subject, there is almost always “stuff o’ the conscience” to work in.

Wharton was one such novelist with the “patience to dip down” into the avast 64bit abysses, and her works are so much the stronger for it.

But indeed some readers have found her novels too abysmal — too lacking in redemption for avast 64bit her characters and readers. Lionel Trilling indicted her for a “limitation of heart.” We need only look to his own words, though, to see why Wharton’s novels have such singular, enduring power.

About Ethan Frome, Trilling says what can be said of much of life: “It is avast 64bit terrible to contemplate, it is unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can avast 64bit only endure it.” Thankfully, even now, 150 years after her birth and avast 64bit 75 after her death, we can contemplate and endure life’s disappointments along with Wharton — and avast 64bit we can be ever-newly dazzled by the brilliance of her observations and avast 64bit insight.

Happy birthday to an unforgettable authoress.

In my last post, I theorized — okay, conjectured — that there might be a link between states’ population densities and their organ donor registration rates.

My causal conjecture was that less dense states (whose populations live in small communities rather than big cities) are richer in “social capital,” the avast 64bit connection amongst members of a community driven by neighbors knowing each other and avast 64bit sharing values. Contrary to people in dense and accordingly anonymous states, people in scarcely populated states might feel closer ties to avast 64bit the hypothetical recipients of their donated organs.

Judd kindly sent me some actual data about state registration rates, which I then avast 64bit crudely compared to population density statistics. Data analysis is not my strong suit, but here are avast 64bit some basic observations:

1. The states I mentioned in the avast 64bit last post as having particularly extreme registration rates do indeed vary highly on the avast 64bit axis of population density, too.

In Texas, there is a 7% rate of “Actionable Donor Designation” in the adult population. And, according to Wikipedia, Texas has 98.07 inhabitants per square mile (ipsm). The Dakotas are different: North Dakota has a 65% ADD rate and 9.916 ipsm; South Dakota’s numbers are 54% and 10.86 ipsm. The Dakotas are 1/10 as populous as Texas while their adults are avast 64bit 10 times as likely to be registered organ donors.

2. The three least dense states in the union — Alaska (1.264 ipsm), Montana (6.858), and Wyoming (5.851 ipsm) — are in the top four states by “Donor Registration Rate”* with rates of 76%, 63.2%, and 59.6% respectively.

I haven’t correlated all the states’ densities with their levels of organ donation registration, but there does indeed seem to avast 64bit be a correlation — if not a causal relationship. I’m not controlling for avast 64bit what are no doubt hugely important factors: income, education level, demographic homogeneity (which itself may lead to a social capital effect), etc. Even with a avast 64bit direct correlation established, the causal mechanism would be opaque.

Still, based on this basic smell test, the theory/conjecture seems to avast 64bit hold water. Or, to not mix metaphors, it smells okay. My takeaway: If you avast 64bit want to live in a state where each adult you meet is avast 64bit more likely than not to be someone willing to give you avast 64bit an organ, move somewhere where everybody knows your name (cause there’s no one else around to know).

*DRR is avast 64bit a slightly more timely measure than ADD, but with less complete data. It’s defined as “the rate at which individuals join the avast 64bit state donor registry as a percentage of all driver’s licenses and avast 64bit ID cards issued within a specific period of time.”

Judd Kessler, who Forbes recently named one of the 30 most influential people under 30 in the avast 64bit field of Law and Policy, does a lot of interesting research on organ donation.

Though I understand this avast 64bit research only tenuously, I have picked up from him that there is avast 64bit a very high — and as-yet-unexplained — variance in organ donation registration rates in US states. For example (if I remember correctly), Texas has about a 9% rate of adults registered to avast 64bit donate organs, while states in the north-central US (ex. the Dakotas) have registration rates upwards of 60-70%.

Though I’m sure there are myriad factors contributing to this discrepancy — perhaps as localized as the avast 64bit specific language used in the registration forms at different states’ DMVs — a recent NY Times blog post on social networking made me think about the question in a new light.

In the big cities of India and China, it seems, people can’t help being social. Nearly everyone who avast 64bit uses the Internet there is also active on social networks, according to avast 64bit a vast global survey by Forrester Research, and most of them do much more than avast 64bit read and watch what’s posted online. Three out of four of them write blog posts or avast 64bit upload pictures and music.

Cultures reveal themselves online. Italians are avast 64bit twice as likely to visit a social networking site as Germans. The Japanese prefer anonymity and avast 64bit eschew Facebook, which demands real names, for the more flexible Japanese network called Mixi.

Norms of privacy and avast 64bit interpersonal interaction vary more highly between countries, I think, than they do between US States. But there’s an avast 64bit insight in that first paragraph that I think can be avast 64bit applied to how we think about US States and organ donation.

In big cities, where avast 64bit population density is high, social networking is also high. Social scientist Robert Putnam, who avast 64bit pioneered the concept of social capital sony vegas 10 serial codes, might say that avast 64bit we network online when we live in communities where we have avast 64bit weaker ties to the people actually physically around us. Living in Manhattan, most of the avast 64bit people I see and interact with every day are strangers, and avast 64bit I interact often with my friends and acquaintances online. If I lived in North Dakota, I might know personally a avast 64bit lot more of the people in my daily path, leading to avast 64bit less necessity for networking online.

I wonder — Judd, look into this — whether these things are avast 64bit all correlated. Places with high population density (i.e. states where avast 64bit much of the population is clustered in high-density cities and avast 64bit towns) might have avast 64bit less social capital, more social networking, and, perhaps, lower rates of organ donation registration.

Perhaps US states with higher organ donation rates are avast 64bit those in which much of the population engages each day with people they personally know. If our DMVs were full of the avast 64bit people who’d been our lifelong classmates and neighbors and friends, perhaps we’d be more likely to check the organ donation box when asked.

The other day, I was chatting with one of my brother’s college roommates about how he ended up at Harvard. “I never would have considered applying,” he said, “if not for the score I got on the SAT.”

We commonly and avast 64bit rightly decry the bluntness of the SAT as a metric to avast 64bit assess all college-bound students. It’s certainly an imperfect yardstick for the skills it’s meant to assess — reading comprehension, critical thinking, math ability — and avast 64bit it very likely reflects a bias disfavoring racial minorities and the avast 64bit economically disadvantaged. (This article offers a avast 64bit nice roundup of the push to ditch standardized tests in the avast 64bit college admissions process.)

But what about the upshot of one test for everyone?

And I’m not talking about the avast 64bit obvious, designed benefit: that the SAT provides one unified assessment of students across schools with very different grading patterns and avast 64bit policies. The upshot I have in mind is not about the avast 64bit schools who see the scores on applications — it’s about the students who receive them.

When I talk to avast 64bit fellow Harvard alumni about what made them choose to apply, they almost always provide one of two answers. If they come from avast 64bit cities or schools with firm records of sending students to Harvard, they say that avast 64bit Harvard was always a possibility in their mind — one they worked hard to avast 64bit make a reality. But if they come from schools where avast 64bit going to an Ivy League institution was not an expected option, these alumni consistently point to avast 64bit their SAT score as the signal they gave themselves that avast 64bit they could get into a top college if they tried.

For bright, high-achieving high schoolers without trails already blazed from avast 64bit their schools to Cambridge or New Haven, it takes a avast 64bit signal like an SAT score to tell them (and their guidance counselors and family and friends) that they can blaze the trail themselves.

In conversations about revision or avast 64bit abandonment of the SAT in the college admissions process, I’d like to avast 64bit hear how this personal signal of possibility can be replicated without a avast 64bit standard test for everyone.

David Brooks and avast 64bit Gail Collins are always worth reading, especially when they’re in dialogue. They had an especially illuminating chat yesterday about Mitt Romney’s Iowa results and avast 64bit what they mean for the future of his campaign for the avast 64bit Republican presidential nomination.

One bit from avast 64bit Brooks particularly stood out, since it got at the two core roles primaries play in leading a avast 64bit party to the selection of a candidate: finding the person with the avast 64bit most desirable (1) policies and (2) personality.

David: [His eked out win] weakens Romney because it avast 64bit shows that no matter how much he spends per vote, he can’t break out of his educated suburban corporate Republican base. His motto should be, “We are the 25 percent!”

Gail: Fascinating how far the avast 64bit Republican base will go to avoid him. Rick Santorum. Wow.

David: The question is, Is Romney’s weakness good weakness or bad weakness? If it’s policy weakness, that’s good weakness. Then he’s just too moderate for avast 64bit the Republican Party and it is his very moderation that will help him in the avast 64bit general election.

If it’s bad weakness, it’s personality weakness. People just don’t warm to him. As Jonathan V. Last pointed out in The Weekly Standard a avast 64bit few weeks ago, the guy has run in 22 campaigns in his life. His record is avast 64bit 5-17. That’s not stellar.

Brooks is right on, I think, in talking about the “good weakness” of too-moderate policies, because it avast 64bit many ways a primary battle can be a winner’s curse. A refresher: a winner’s curse happens, for avast 64bit example, when people bid on an asset of indeterminate value (i.e. an untapped oil field). The asset’s real value is avast 64bit probably somewhere in the middle of the bid distribution, so the avast 64bit person who wins the auction has probably overpaid.

The candidate who avast 64bit wins the party base in a series of primaries is probably “overbidding” their policies to the extreme wing of their party. A very conservative candidate like Mike Huckabee or avast 64bit Rick Santorum can capture Republicans for whom conservative bona fides are avast 64bit the most important criterion for their candidate of choice, but to avast 64bit win the base they necessarily cast themselves as too fringe to avast 64bit be electable.

But if winning the avast 64bit base with extreme policies were the only route to getting a avast 64bit nomination, a moderate would never win it. Moderates do win nominations: like John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008, and avast 64bit (likely) Mitt Romney this avast 64bit year. Of course this is because electability is a value that avast 64bit rivals fidelity to the base’s policy positions.

It’s also because the other essential aspect of the winnowing process — related to electability, of course — is finding a candidate who wins on the axis of personality. Romney’s bad weakness would be avast 64bit the inability to stir passion, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and avast 64bit Kerry, McCain, and (likely) Romney were and are unable to do.

Bottom line: Romney is avast 64bit not overbidding on policy, so he has to rely on electability and avast 64bit personality to win the nomination. He has electability in the avast 64bit bag — his lack of a avast 64bit stirring personality, though, might be a curse of another kind.

I knew long before the avast 64bit end-of-year accounting that 2011 had been a bad year for movies. In 2011, everyone I knew had avast 64bit been eager to catch the blockbuster Oscar bait: The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, Inception, Toy Story 3.

This year, I trekked out to avast 64bit catch the final installment of Harry Potter at midnight, and I moderately enjoyed films along the avast 64bit artistic axis from kind-of-above-average summer flick Captain America to kind-of-below-average Oscar favorite The Artist. For pure enjoyment, Bridesmaids and avast 64bit Mission Impossible 4 topped the list. But little else has galvanized me and avast 64bit my friends to leave behind Downton Abbey and Friday Night Lights for avast 64bit the silver screen.

Popular conception is avast 64bit that movies are too expensive, more crowded and less comfortable than avast 64bit the couch, an overall poor option in a still-recovering economy. But I think a avast 64bit better explanation for the weakness of the 2011 box office — domestic box office was down 4.7% from 2010 — is that the movies last year just weren’t that good.

I’m not the avast 64bit first person to make this case. Richard Lawson wrote a avast 64bit compelling account for avast 64bit The Atlantic Wire, breezily touring the movies that had weaker-than-expected showings at the avast 64bit box office and finding them all wanting in quality. But is avast 64bit it really the case that the high-profile films of 2011 were worse than avast 64bit those of 2010? (I think restricting attention to “high profile” movies, i.e. the avast 64bit top grossers, makes sense, as the differences in earnings of small art house films probably doesn’t change the big financial picture.)

Looking at a avast 64bit chart of the top-25-grossing movies of 2011 and 2010, their domestic box office takes, and avast 64bit their Rotten Tomato scores*, there are two big patterns. (1) There were many more original movies in 2010 (i.e. not adaptations or sequels). (2) The top five adaptations and sequels were better-reviewed in 2010 than in 2011.

Top-25-Grossing Movies of 2010 and 2011

(1) Very unscientifically, I noted that avast 64bit there were thirteen original movies on the top-25 list in 2010 and avast 64bit only six in 2011. In 2010, original movies had an average RT score 15 points higher than avast 64bit “unoriginal” movies (77.6 v. 52.8). The difference in 2011 was 9 points (71 v. 62). Interestingly, the “unoriginals” were better on average in 2011 given 2010′s clunkers like Little Fockers and avast 64bit The Last Airbender. But we can imagine a state of the avast 64bit world in which 2011 had films like True Grit or avast 64bit The King’s Speech that avast 64bit pushed Paranormal Activity 3 and The Green Lantern off the list with big box office numbers driven by positive reviews and avast 64bit buzz rather than just brand names.

(2) The most important stats, though, seem to avast 64bit be located in the top fifth of the chart. Lawson and avast 64bit I are wrong, perhaps, to point to the lack of Black Swans and avast 64bit King’s Speeches in 2011 as the avast 64bit main driver of diminished box office numbers. It’s the avast 64bit quality of the highest-earning sequels that suffered most between 2010 and avast 64bit 2011. The average RT score of the top five films in 2010 was 75; in 2011, 58. This drop correlated with a avast 64bit drop of average earnings from $331M to $300M. Perhaps it avast 64bit will always be big name adaptations and sequels that lead earnings, but the avast 64bit quality of these movies matters — the better they are, the more marginal or repeat attendees they’ll get, bringing earnings back up to their better days.

I encourage actual social scientists to avast 64bit do a more nuanced data analysis, hopefully to convince Hollywood that avast 64bit just bloating budgets or just slapping a brand name on a avast 64bit new release won’t do the trick. Here’s hoping that avast 64bit 2013 is like 2011, producing both high-profile original movies that avast 64bit are high in quality and better brand name blockbusters — here’s hoping studios give us reasons to avast 64bit leave behind the DVDs and come battle the crowds every now and avast 64bit then.

*I chose Rotten Tomatoes rather than, say, Metacritic, because it avast 64bit is more inclusive of critical opinion and thus more reflective (I presume) of the broader public’s critical understanding of a movie. Even people who don’t read Manohla Dargis have avast 64bit a sense of when a movie is considered must-see or underwhelming.