Urbane Sprawl

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

Though I understand this research only tenuously, I have picked up from him that there is 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 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 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 uses the Internet there is also active on social networks, according to a vast global survey by Forrester Research, and most of them do much more than read and watch what’s posted online. Three out of four of them write blog posts or upload pictures and music.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps US states with higher organ donation rates are those in which much of the population engages each day with people they personally know. If our DMVs were full of the 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 rightly decry the bluntness of the SAT as a metric to 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 it very likely reflects a bias disfavoring racial minorities and the economically disadvantaged. (This article offers a nice roundup of the push to ditch standardized tests in the college admissions process.)

But what about the upshot of one test for everyone?

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

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

For bright, high-achieving high schoolers without trails already blazed from their schools to Cambridge or New Haven, it takes a 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 abandonment of the SAT in the college admissions process, I’d like to hear how this personal signal of possibility can be replicated without a standard test for everyone.

I knew long before the end-of-year accounting that 2011 had been a bad year for movies. In 2011, everyone I knew had 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 catch the final installment of Harry Potter at midnight, and I moderately enjoyed films along the 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 Mission Impossible 4 topped the list. But little else has galvanized me and my friends to leave behind Downton Abbey and Friday Night Lights for the silver screen.

Popular conception is that movies are too expensive, more crowded and less comfortable than the couch, an overall poor option in a still-recovering economy. But I think a 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 first person to make this case. Richard Lawson wrote a compelling account for The Atlantic Wire, breezily touring the movies that had weaker-than-expected showings at the box office and finding them all wanting in quality. But is it really the case that the high-profile films of 2011 were worse than those of 2010? (I think restricting attention to “high profile” movies, i.e. the 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 chart of the top-25-grossing movies of 2011 and 2010, their domestic box office takes, and 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 there were thirteen original movies on the top-25 list in 2010 and only six in 2011. In 2010, original movies had an average RT score 15 points higher than “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 The Last Airbender. But we can imagine a state of the world in which 2011 had films like True Grit or The King’s Speech that pushed Paranormal Activity 3 and The Green Lantern off the list with big box office numbers driven by positive reviews and buzz rather than just brand names.

(2) The most important stats, though, seem to be located in the top fifth of the chart. Lawson and I are wrong, perhaps, to point to the lack of Black Swans and King’s Speeches in 2011 as the main driver of diminished box office numbers. It’s the quality of the highest-earning sequels that suffered most between 2010 and 2011. The average RT score of the top five films in 2010 was 75; in 2011, 58. This drop correlated with a drop of average earnings from $331M to $300M. Perhaps it will always be big name adaptations and sequels that lead earnings, but the 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 do a more nuanced data analysis, hopefully to convince Hollywood that just bloating budgets or just slapping a brand name on a new release won’t do the trick. Here’s hoping that 2013 is like 2011, producing both high-profile original movies that are high in quality and better brand name blockbusters — here’s hoping studios give us reasons to leave behind the DVDs and come battle the crowds every now and then.

*I chose Rotten Tomatoes rather than, say, Metacritic, because it 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 a sense of when a movie is considered must-see or underwhelming.

And while I’m on the topic of rationalization and its discontents, I must mention another darling of the zeitgeist — another phenomenon notable for its sharp break from a rationalized narrative: ChatRoulette.

Like reality TV, online communication has become rationalized over the past decade. We used to sign on, unfettered, to loosely categoritzed AOL chatrooms, for no other purpose but to converse with strangers about whatever came to mind.

Within the world of public online discourse, new structures popped up to help us find more quickly and accurately what — or, I should say, whom — we were looking for. Special interest message board sites for new parents, golf enthusiasts, and arthritis sufferers appeared. Surfers created sites for posing questions in deeply nested categories (Yahoo! Answers), while other sites for listing goods to buy and sell staked claim to their own turf (Craigslist, eBay).

For those of us who just wanted to talk, we got new tools to weed out the weirdos and promote interaction with our friends (or friends of friends): from a/s/l, there were Friendster and Facebook; from chatrooms, there were Google docs and groups and waves.

We gave ourselves better tools to find the right people and talk to them about the right things, but in the process we walled our communities in — and walled in ourselves.

That all changed (for the moment, at least) with ChatRoulette, a website that provides each user a complettely unfiltered video chat connection to another, randomly-selected user. One can stay to chat or click through to the next stranger out in the world of the webcams — an unmediated, unrationalized communication landscape. Like an early, almost empty AOL chatroom — with cameras.

Millions of users’ curiosity has been piqued enough to sign onto the site and see what they might find (even though they often find a close-up and uncensored view of some other user’s genitalia), and it’s easy to see why: ChatRoulette breaks down the barriers we’ve spent a decade erecting, and it unmasks us from the usual anonimity of blog comments and user reviews. It takes us from a bureaucratized present to a wild west past.

But, as is natural with all human processes, we may soon find ChatRoulette fall victim to a self-undermining rationalization that we saw befall reality TV. We will be moved to carve it up into interest-based rooms, we will “like” some users and “friend” others, and soon we will be building a city on what is now an empty landscape.

Sam Anderson described this rationalizing impulse in a piece on ChatRoulette in New York Magazine, at once predicting ChatRoulette’s fragmented future and exalting its unbridled present:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

But that site would also lose a lot of what makes ChatRoulette, for now, so weirdly magnetic. If I’d been able to curate my experience, I might never have had what ended up being my favorite interaction: a half-hour chat with a twentysomething, vaguely Kurt Cobain–ish guy in Pittsburgh. We started with the obligatory ganja jokes, but suddenly he turned serious. “Actually,” he typed, “I’m a mystic.” When he offered me a tarot-card reading, I considered clicking “next” in search of more dancing Koreans. I’ve never had a psychic reading—in fact I’ve actively refused them on many occasions—but something about the strangeness of the context made me accept. Although I only vaguely remember the content of the reading itself (I like nature, have been thinking about taking a big trip, etc.), the experience was surprisingly powerful. It felt generous and deep and oddly very human.

Contemplating the filtered, statistically-tracked, rationalized version of ChatRoulette that Anderson fantasizes about  — while considering the losses that would come with an inhibited version of this paragon of inhibition — we realize that, even when we discuss a website built 90 years after his death, Max Weber was right.

The End of Reality: Part II.

This is what happens in the blogosphere: I vow to post more persistently, then go five months without an update. No more vows — just a futile hope that I can muster the energy and wherewithal to actually record my thoughts for you, my faithful(?) audience.

So where was I?

***

Yes, even reality shows can jump the shark, because even reality shows can have artistic integrity and grounding assertions. In the case of Project Runway, it had continually cast itself as the high-brow reality show (embracing the implied contradiction), insisting it is meritocratic even within its convoluted constraints.

During its last season, Heidi went so far as to verbalize its internal logic: “three strikes, and you’re out.” But in Christopher’s survival past three egregiously heinous strikes, the foundational arguments of the show were thrown over and the series — or, at least, the season (for each new batch of contestants provides its own potentially-redemptive slate-wiping) — jumped the shark.

Where does this leave us? With the realization that we are nearing, at, or just past a critical inflection point in the genre.

***

It’s taken for granted these days that “reality shows” no longer represent anything “real.” Shows that, at their launch, trained their cameras on non-camera-trained individuals in unfamiliar settings and constructs (The Real World, The Bachelor, Survivor, American Idol) have become repetitive and clichéd. New reality shows have eschewed the goals of their antecedents entirely, uninterested in gleaning insight about real people in microcosm (The Hills, the entire VH1 reality line-up).

When Court TV distanced itself from trial coverage, moving towards documentary shows about true crime and dangerous jobs, it renamed itself “TruTV” and worked our disenchantment with reality TV right into its motto: “Not Reality. Actuality.” “Reality” as a TV genre has become meaningless, a codeword for nothing more than non-fiction (not necessarily unscripted) starring individuals playing themselves, or versions of themselves (not necessarily non-actors).

But the meaninglessness of “Reality” and the inescapable cliché of contemporary reality shows are merely symptoms of culture — they are not the ding an sich (the thing in itself).

Of what are they symptoms? The Rationalization of Reality.

***

Father of sociology Max Weber described “rationalization” as the unavoidable progression of systems (both physical systems and systems of thought) from inefficient abstraction to cold logic that occurs as we gain better understanding of means and ends, cause and effect, and adapt accordingly. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to understand, and I’m doing it no favors with my abstruse attempts at definition. Examples are the best way to get at it — metonymically.

Bureaucratization is a great example: From early governments and companies that deal with issues ad hoc, with messy delegating and overlapping domains, we develop bureaucracies, with clearly delineated institutions and internal hierarchies for each carefully differentiated issue. So we get the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Canada, Mexico and NAFTA Issues in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Health has also been extremely rationalized over the last few centuries: from a vague understanding of illness tied into conceptions of sin and virtue, we’ve developed keen observations of patterns of sickness and of the world on a microscopic level — we now understand how germs are disseminated, and we’ve developed highly organized systems of treatments for every conceivable array of symptoms.

Even something as simple as our usage of a park can become rationalized. From an open field, we develop well-trod paths where the most people have found the most amenable routes. From free and spontaneous play all around, we designate an area for picnics and an area for baseball. From inconsistent self-policing, we develop rules and guidelines and post them on big green signs forbidding cell phone usage from 11am to 4pm.

While rationalization makes these systems and our lives more efficient, we become constrained by the rigidity of the structures we’ve made for ourselves. We become, as Weber wrote a bit melodramatically, trapped in an “iron cage” and our world devolves into a “polar night of icy darkness.”

But we can see where Weber’s coming from. In a hyper-rationalized landscape of, for instance, mental health, every possible deviation from “normalcy” becomes its own syndrome. As Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker (paraphrasing David Healy in “The Antidepressant Era”), “if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.” As we are constantly hone in on more taut relationships between causes and effects, we can become blinded to the bigger picture.

***

From a brief survey of reality programming over the last decade, we can clearly see the bigger picture of authenticity being lost as shows become rationalized to milk drama from ultimately inauthentic characters and conventions. But before we can perform that survey, we have to understand the shows and the goals of their subjects and producers.

To generalize, there are two main sub-genres of reality TV: the documentary series (The Real World, The Hills, Jersey Shore) and the game show (Survivor, Project Runway, The Bachelor). Though the lines are blurry — there’s not much fundamental difference between I Love New York and New York Goes to Work — there is an essential distinction. While contestants on game shows are competing for a prize (be it a million dollars or the love of an over-the-hill 80s hip hop artist), with individuals often voted off each week, the subjects of documentary series need only exist within the contrived situations mapped out for them (New York works at a farm! Eight strangers stop being polite and start getting real!).

The goals of the early contestants on game shows was to win. Now, contestants want to win, but they also hope to gain some moderate level of fame and future opportunity through participation. Tabatha Coffey parlayed her appearance on the reality game show Shear Genius into her own reality documentary series, Tabatha’s Salon Takeover; Big Brother’s Jeff and Jordan won $500,000 and $25,000, respectively, and won enough of America’s affection to land them on The Amazing Race; myriad former contestants on American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway have leveraged their fifteen minutes of fame into much longer periods of moderate success in their chosen fields.

The goal of the subjects of reality’s documentary series was, at one point, simply to participate (think the early Real Worlders). Now, it seems their goals are primarily focused toward the attention they can earn by being interesting “characters” on their shows.

In both cases, the goals of the shows’ producers is viewership, achieved by making their programs interesting. Interesting can take many forms — cloyingly romantic (The Bachelor), cringingly pathetic (Celebrity Rehab), explosively charged (The Bad Girls Club) — but, in all cases, producers hope that their programs’ drama will translate into throngs of dedicated viewers.

Understanding the goals of the constituent individuals, we can see how reality TV can become rationalized: participants and producers better understand the means and ends of achieving success however defined (a million dollars, future opportunities, high ratings) and acting accordingly.

***

Let’s consider game shows first. Like people walking in a well-trod park looking for the best routes, early participants in reality contests found themselves more or less successful depending on different strategies of behavior, leading to the carving out of conventional types. From the complete blank slate of the first season of Survivor — in which Sue Hawk and Rudy Boesch had no touchstone against which to judge Richard Hatch, no model for suggesting they should suspect his scheming and double-dealing — there is now the season of “Heros” and “Villains,” with contestants from past seasons so neatly fitting into the types pioneered by their reality forbears that the subtextual “types” have become the text itself.

Every kind of game show — from talent to matchmaking to social experiment — has gone through enough iterations to develop these same conventions, these same paths through the park, and now contestants cannot help but retread the same steps. Reality game shows now have such clearly articulated narratives of success and failure that contemporary seasons cannot feel like anything more than variations on a theme.

And what about documentary shows? At the beginning, producers plumbed drama from the conflict between individuals from disparate backgrounds in contrived social situations. Untrained and unfamiliar with what patterns of behavior would lead to post-participitory fame — and unfamiliar with the notion that participation could lead to fame at all — the individuals on whom the cameras were focused acted authentically, and to the fascination of viewing audiences. But once producers noticed what moments were most likely to lead to the camera’s and audience’s attention — fights, sex, sloppy drunkenness leading to fights and sex — they began casting participants most likely to slap each other, sleep with each other, and drink to excess. The first season of the Real World becomes every subsequent season, with the frat-boy jock, the Mormon, the gay guy, the alcoholic — characters who were at one time simply compelling real people — cast to foster the contrived drama the producers think will attract audiences and that now-savvy participants think will attract future job opportunities.

In some cases, like The Hills, the producers have gone so far as to hire writers to ensure that each episode has the drama that unscripted reality shows cannot guarantee will arise on a regular schedule. Whole shows like Celebrity Rehab are built around premises designed for maximum pathos with little regard for documenting relatable human experience. Reality documentary shows are so manipulated to foster the drama that authenticity once provided that they have become scripted echoes of their true-to-life ancestors.

The problem with this rationalization is that any value reality TV once had as a genre inhered in its represnetation of authentic human experience. Settings like Survivor’s deserted island or American Idol’s big stage or the Real World apartment were contrived, but there was no behavioral model to follow for the early participants — no conventions of “successful” participation. Their behaviors and conflicts were thus authentic and engaging: Pedro on The Real World, Richard Hatch on Survivor, Jay McCarroll on Project Runway, and Omarosa on The Apprentice were compelling because they had not yet learned they were performing.

***

But there is hope for the genre; or, there was at least a glimmer of hope during the fall of 2009, when MTV assembled a group of youngsters who wanted no more than to participate in the opportunity provided: a summer at the Jersey Shore.

What made Jersey Shore so compelling to viewers was that it was authentic in a way reality TV hasn’t been in years. Snooki, Sammi, JWow, The Situation, Ronnie, Pauly D, and Vinny were not there to perform — and, indeed, they seemed unaware of the promise of recognition and fame (unaware even of the cameras) until after the show had begun airing. They were there only for a swank house on the Shore and like-minded guidos and guidettes with whom to party. Indeed, Angelina’s early departure is evidence of the fact that her goal was not to be the focus of a reality camera; when she dragged her trash-bag of belongings into the house, one sensed she was there for no more than a good time. When she failed to have that good time, she left.

Though some of the conflicts on the show may have been prompted by the producers (one can’t believe that Vinny really seduced the girlfriend of his boss and landlord unwittingly), the interactions between the characters — and between them and the other people at the shore — was strikingly, unsettlingly realistic.

The phenomenon was fostered by the guido/guidette-framed nature of the grouping. Unlike The Real World, whose social experiment was once premised on people from diverse backgrounds coming into conflict, Jersey Shore had no such pretensions of diversity — a shallowness that in fact bolstered its representational success. When one goes from a community of like-minded people to a setting in which one is a minority (think The Mormon on The Real World), one must be as much a representative of one’s group as a normal version of oneself. Snooki and her kin did not need to be “the guido” in an unsympathetic group — they needed only be themselves.

But the magical moment of Jersey Shore season 1 is not replicable. Copycat shows (the as-yet-unnamed-Brighton-Beach-based spinoff, Jerseylicious) now have an implicit script to follow, characters to cast. Even the cast of Jersey Shore season 1 will be camera-trained and ratings-minded when they shoot season 2 this summer.

Still, there is a lesson here: Rather than manipulating reality shows to wring compelling television out of known-to-be-dramatic characters and conventions, we must find the last batch of people who are not yet characters and the last batch of contrivances that are not yet conventions. Any show with an existing script for success and drama, a script written by the last decade of the genre, will be fated to staleness. Only by a renewed commitment to authenticity can we break out of the “iron cage” of rationalization — only with a jettisoning of characters and conventions can reality TV be real again.

The End of Reality: Part I.

On Thursday, October 25, 2009, at 9:57 PM, Project Runway jumped the shark.

I know ‘jumping the shark’ is a loaded concept that’s now bordering on the cliché. And it’s easy to indict a show that’s having a lackluster season — especially a reality competition that’s suffering from inconsistent and frustrating judging — of having debased itself in some core way. But I think ‘jumping the shark’ is a very particular kind of invalidation, one perpetrated by PR in its last episode.

First, the facts. Spoiler alert.

In the bottom two on Thursday night: feather prince Nicolas Putvinski, with his malproportioned Grecian fantasy; and fragile autodidact Christopher Straub, with his indescribably bad “Sante Fe”-”inspired” “outfit” to match his unfortunate, hairline-thin, jawline-hugging facial hair.

Christopher, an earnest if overconfident soul from Shakopee, Minnesota, was making his fourth appearance in the bottom in just as many weeks. After a strong showing early in the competition, Christopher continued to display an utter lack of taste; it was his third time in bottom two, a perch from which he outlasted better competitors Louise and Shirin.

Somehow, Christopher had continued to squeak by on something — remembered potential? Simple favoritism?

This week, though, the there was simply no way he could get another reprieve after running so long on fabric fumes. Michael Kors described his Sante Fe garment as “costume.” Heidi was more frank: “unwearable,” she said; and, later, “just ugly.”

It was thus with the collective gasp of a million viewers that Heidi announced, “Christopher… you’re in.”

***

This season of Project Runway was problematic far before last week. After relocating to Lifetime and Los Angeles, the show has been unmoored by innumerable absences from New York-based judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors.

Consistent judging is essential for a show like Project Runway, where contestants prove their mettle and articulate their point-of-view over a season’s worth of wacky challenges. If I had missed school as many times as either judge has abandoned their post (or, more accurately, their runway-side stool) this season, I would’ve never made it past the seventh grade.

There have been other problems, too.

None of the contestants has impressed audiences with innovative design. Each week, the winning designs seem to be the ones conceived and executed with the most competence, not originality.

And none of the personalities has proven exceptionally engaging, leaving an absence of interesting interpersonal dynamics. Yes, Irina is a bitch and Carol Hannah thinks Logan is attractive. But it’s hard to summon hatred for Irina, as she is the most consistently successful of the designers; it’s harder to empathize with Carol Hannah, as Logan is criminally devoid of personality.

So why was Christopher’s third bottom-two survival the moment that marked the jumping of the shark?

***

Let’s take a step back. What does it mean to jump the shark?

Wikipedia defines the term as “a colloquialism coined by Jon Hein and used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations. This usually corresponds to the point where a show with falling ratings apparently becomes more desperate to draw in viewers.”

This definition approaches the phenomenon by metonymy: yes, jumping the shark is often found in conjunction with declining ratings, and it often occurs vis-a-vis absurdity or inconsistency. But these are not the ding an sich.

What these associations hint at is the core of shark-jumping: a cultural object’s forfeiture of artistic integrity. A TV show jumps the shark when it ceases playing by its internally-established rules or abandons its foundational premises.

Happy Days jumped the shark when Fonzie literally jumped a shark on water skies (still in his trademark leather jacket), but it jumped the shark because in that moment it gave up the pretense that it was a naturalistic representation of the lives of Richie Cunningham and his 50s teenage friends.

Cousin Oliver came to stay with the Brady Bunch because of their declining ratings, but the show jumped the shark because his arrival fundamentally altered its premise as a sitcom built on the foibles of what happened after a lovely lady bringing up three very lovely girls married a man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own — this was a show with its premises built right into the theme song!

When Christopher lived to sew another day after first taking up residence in the bottom and then living their comfortably for a month, it wasn’t just an opportunity to scream at the screen — it marked Project Runway’s loss of artistic integrity.

***

Much of the best cultural criticism being written today can be found on a blog called FourFour, where Rick Juzwiak meditates on music, web culture, and, most prominently, reality TV. (His recaps of America’s Next Top Model offer enough motivation in themselves to continue watching.)

On the occasion of Project Runway’s sixth season premiere, he wrote about the show he once recapped but never fell in love with:

Project Runway has a reputation for being a high-brow reality show, probably because of its supposed investment in talent, its tempered contestants and its consistent pacing. I think assigning high- and low-culture status within the genre of reality TV is like assigning a hierarchy of pork products, from, say, belly to scrapple. In the end, it’s all fucking pig…

I don’t mean to hold its hype against it, and it’s not like Project Runway ultimately does that great of a job in avoiding being what it is, anyway. People are not there to make friends, they throw each other under the bus, this isn’t the last you’ve heard of them when they’re bounced. As though sniffing out truffles, the casting agents fill the show with types…

There is an androgynous, aggressively coiffed pseudo-intellect who described his design as “ineffable,” but was unfortunately incorrect as he didn’t then shut up.

In response to the task of designing for the red carpet, this one also said “I don’t differentiate between different colored carpets,” which, uh, yeah you do because you just called them “different.” It was here that I was reminded of maybe the main reason I stopped watching this show: I find humorless snobs too excruciating to even laugh at, and as a fashion-design competition, pretension runs thick on Project Runway. It’s not the show’s fault, per se, it’s just how it works out.

Juzwiak has never been able to sign onto Project Runway’s premises — that it is a cut above the typical reality competition, a true search for the best that rewards the excellent and dismisses the dilettantes — but these are its premises indeed. These are the reasons discerning viewers, who would never deign to watch Top Model, have fawned over Daniel Vosovic and Jeffrey Sebelia and Christian Siriano and Korto Momolu for years.

But Juzwiak is right: Project Runway was never perfect, and it has always had more base reality conventions sewn into the muslin core beneath its silk exterior. Yes, contestants who make for good TV might outlast their less interesting competitors. Yes, the challenges with their money- and time-limits are contrived.

Still, the internal logic of the competition demands that continued ineptitude be punished. The show is built on its premise of pretension, of being the highbrow reality competition that may give a second and third chance, but never a fourth.

***

At the beginning of this season, there was a contestant named Mitchell, whose last name I forget. Technically talentless, he seemed constitutionally incapable of assembling a wearable garment by the time of the runway show.

He was in the bottom two in week one, but was kept over the otherworldly Ari Fish. He was in the bottom two in week two, but was kept over the ineffable Malvin Vein. Viewers were frustrated, seeing admittedly eccentric designers leave before the bungling Mitchell.

But, then, justice.

In week three, Mitchell found himself in the bottom two for the third time — and this was after a challenge in which his team had won!

It was unprecedented, but clearly required by the logic of the show — his continued failure could not be countenanced.

Heidi made the awaited pronouncement: “Never in Project Runway history has a team member for a winning design been eliminated. Three strikes and you’re out.”

Flash forward to October 22. Christopher sews together fabric that leaves fellow designer Althea dumbstruck: “If Christopher can put that garment down the runway and not get eliminated, then I don’t know what’s going on.” We all agree.

He lands in the bottom two for the third time. The logic of the competition, the internal rules of the show articulated by Heidi herself, demand his expulsion.

But he survives. And he’s not even good TV.

The rules are broken. The premises are thrown over. The foundation collapses.

Project Runway jumps the shark.

***

In my next post, I’ll explore what Project Runway’s shark-jumping says about the state of reality TV — a genre built on the premise of representing “reality” that may be increasingly incapable of fulfilling its foundational requirement.

Note that this series is also being posted on Tears and Jeers, a pop culture blog written with Sachi Ezura. It was relevant to both blogs’ interests, and I couldn’t choose just one place to post. And some cross-blog promotion never hurts.

A couple of months ago, during the late-lamented summer, my parents and I found ourselves driving from Shelter Island’s Heights back to the Center, from the pharmacy and Stars Café to the post office and George’s IGA.

Turning into Dering Harbor village (population: 13), we were treated to a unusual sight for our small, modest island community: two young women in bikinis skipped down the street arm-in-arm, Laverne-and-Shirley-style, with their bikini bottoms pulled down beneath their pert-but-untanned buttocks. My father later recounted that day as his favorite of the summer.

We also later discovered that this semi-nude jaunting had been a summer-long habit of the two women, likely a fun way to get a rise out of the more staid and sheltered residents of the island.

Unfortunately for one of the women, who had been working as a hostess at one of the island’s inns, her reputation got back to dining room. When it did, she was fired.

While my parents thought it was ridiculous that the woman should be dismissed just for having a little fun, my grandmother and I agreed that the inn’s owners were right — or at least had the right — to dissociate their business from their hostess’s indecent public displays.

It surprised me, though, to see an institution actually exercising a desire to uphold somewhat stuck-up standards of “decency”; the idea of a small-town community collectively looking down their noses at an impetuous young woman — and actually ostracizing her in some real way — seemed to belong more to the age of Ellen Olenska or even Hester Prynne than the age of Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga.

I thought about the incident again last month after reading an article in the New York Times “Vows” section about a couple that met and fell in love while performing together in La Bohème:

…When he kissed her, she momentarily lost her footing. “I was thinking, ‘What was that?’ ” she said. “There was definitely something there.”

After the rehearsal, Mr. Miller decided he had to see Ms. Kabanuck outside of work and invented a reason to call. A question about their schedule quickly turned into an invitation to a movie. That evening they went to see “50 First Dates.”

“I was so drawn to him immediately and tried to talk myself out of it,” Ms. Kabanuck said. Theirs was a clash of outlooks, if not cultures. He wore red cowboy boots, had earrings in both ears and spiked hair. She had been raised as a Baptist fundamentalist and said she remained devout, describing herself as “a little church girl.”

A sweet story so far, an opposites attract rom-com plot against the backdrop of a classic love story. Very Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey. Just one problem:

The date led to a few other encounters, but he was about to depart for Piacenza, Italy, for what he expected to be a triumph as the Duke of Mantua in a new production of “Rigoletto.” She drove him to the airport. Neither of them knew what would happen next. She was still married, but very much wanted to be close to him. He later described the experience of looking into her eyes on the first date as “that thunderstruck moment.”

“I was in love,” he said, “not just in my heart but in head, my body, my soul. That was it.”

…Holed up in a hotel in the Latin Quarter for two weeks, they reveled in their own vie bohème. Only in this version, the two lovers began planning his next career move, an audition for the pop-opera quartet, Il Divo, then being put together by Simon Cowell. She scraped together the last of her money to buy him an MP3 player so he could rehearse.

The player turned out to be a solid investment. He became a member of Il Divo and now tours the world with the group.

Ms. Kabanuck, when she returned from Paris, moved out of the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband and found an apartment in Manhattan. The decision to leave her marriage and devote herself to Mr. Miller was extraordinarily difficult, she conceded. Still, she added, “from the moment our eyes met through those two weeks of being in Paris and the pain of going through a divorce, I knew that I loved him.”

Emphasis mine. Call me old-fashioned, but I was a little thrown to be reading this in the Times.

Sure, love doesn’t always happen neatly, but should adulterers be rewarded with a profile in the Sunday Styles section? The Times chooses whom to include in their highly competitive Weddings pages — isn’t the inclusion of the cheating coloratura and her Divo an implicit (bordering on explicit) endorsement of flouting marital bonds?

The devout “little church girl” shouldn’t have to be marked with a scarlet A, but shouldn’t cheating on her spouse disqualify her from being celebrated in a national newspaper?

I wasn’t the only one surprised: a post on New York Magazine’s “Daily Intel” blog slammed the couple — and others who end up in Vows after cheating on their spouses — for wanting the world to applaud their disregard for their first husbands and wives:

We at Daily Intel are not naïve. We understand that sometimes people in relationships fall in love with other people, and that they sometimes want to marry those people, which necessitates ending their current relationship. The heart wants what the heart wants, and all of that. We get it. We’ve even applauded it, bizarrely. But what we do not understand, what we cannot abide, is when said people, in the throes of connubial bliss, lobby to have themselves included in the New York Times “Vows” column, and then proceed to tell the reporter about how they cheated on their previous partner in a way that suggests they think of it not as something crap they have done to another person but instead like it is a part of their personal love story…

We actually just find it kind of distracting as a reader of Vows, because it raises all kinds of questions that then go unanswered, such as: Do the people who tell these stories really realize this stuff is going to end up in the Times, really? Do they worry that it’s going to ruin their wedding announcement by making them sound awful? And what do the exes think? What’s their version of events?

The authors fault the Times for lazy reporting in not getting the story of the disbanded husbands and wives, but, really, it’s a question of values. Why offer your institution’s extremely well-respected stamp of approval to clearly distasteful if not unethical behavior?

In Edith Wharton’s world, one whiff-of-a-hint of an adultery scandal that coalesced into an acknowledged item of society gossip could push someone out of social life forever.

That end of the spectrum seems too extreme. One mistake doesn’t define a person; there should be room for rehabilitation — of one’s reputation if not of his character.

A few weeks ago, after Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s address to Congress; after Serena Williams told a line judge at the U.S. Open that she’d shove the f-ing tennis ball down her f-ing throat; and after Kanye West assured Taylor Swift he was really happy for her and he was gonna let her finish, but Beyoncé’s video was one of the best of all time, the blogosphere punditocracy’s take-away message was that civility was dead.

But my take-away was slightly different and more reassuring: ostracism was alive, if not totally well.

Joe Wilson was “rebuked” by the House of Representatives, Serena Williams was fined by the tournament, and Kanye West was called a jackass by none other than Barack Obama.

The institutions which these individuals represent — Congress, professional tennis, the United States of America — made clear that their constituents’ actions were not in line with their institutional values.

Like the inn on Shelter Island, unlike the New York Times Vows section, these institutions (metaphorically) fired their flashing hostesses.

But we have a short societal memory and a shorter cultural attention span. These events will remain wrinkles on their perpetrators’ reputations forever, but they won’t bar all reputational rehabilitation.

Case in point: Eliot Spitzer. Eighteen months after resigning in a prostitution scandal, he has a column in Slate and may even run for office again.

This is a kind of provisional ostracism that we now generally practice. Serena can earn back the respect of her fans and become a model sportsman. The flashing hostess can be hired by another Shelter Island restaurant next summer. Institutions can censure those who show disregard for their values while still leaving the door open for redress.

If we want to keep civility alive, though, we must keep ostracism working. We must sometimes retain collective scowls at distasteful behavior. Let’s congratulate former adulterers on their weddings but keep them out of the Weddings sections. Let’s let Michael Vick play football but not give him endorsement deals. Let’s let Joe Wilson keep his seat but not make him minority leader.

And let’s get the flashing hostess a job at the Gardiner’s Bay Country Club so my dad can see her more often.

I was in Los Angeles for the first time last week, and, obviously, parking is a major aspect of LA life, given the necessity of cars to get anywhere.

My brother and I parked one day at a little lot catty-corner from his office, and I was amazed at what a wonderful business parking lot ownership must be.

We paid an attendant $7 to drive in and park the car, and that was it. Scores of other cars did the same that day, for varying lengths of time, and the feat had surely been replicated for years before and will be for years to come. All the lot owner has to do is pay the wage of one attendant to sit at the entrance and collect cash. Lot owners must be minting money all over town!

As I was relaying this thought to my brother, Judd, as we walked to the office, he noted that (a) the pricing schemes aren’t as simple as $7/car, since lots do crazy things like charge different amounts at different times of day, for different durations, etc. and (b) that there are many lots and — pun intended — lots of competition.

So, my thought: what if complicated pricing systems are a mechanism to hedge competition’s effect on price?

If two lots were next to each other and charged straight-forwardly — say, $7/car — then price competition would occur. One would charge $6.50, the other would counter with $6, etc., till both suffered.

Unlike, say, Coke and Pepsi, which build powerful brands and add new flavors, etc., to move their competition away from price wars, parking lots can’t do that.

Instead, they can exhaust drivers with nonsensical pricing schemes to distract them from actually comparing lots’ cost-effectiveness. One lot may be cheaper from 2:53 to 3:17, the other from 3:17 to 4:42. Drivers just won’t bother to do the math each time, and they’ll just park wherever their impulses take them — acting on the knowledge that prices are generally in the same range. This way, the lots can keep their prices up; they’re committing collusion by confusion.

It’s counterintuitive because we’d expect one lot to decide to make their prices very simple and straightforward in order to attract drivers — much like phone companies are simplifying their pricing plans (no more allowance of minutes per month: just one low price no matter how much you talk) — which would make other lots do the same.

Simplicity, in other words, would be a dominant strategy, and would lead to a price war. But somehow these lots have achieved a nice (for them) equilibrium of higher prices by making price calculations not worth the effort for Los Angeles drivers (who might not be the brightest, anyway).

The dearth of female hip-hop artists is not often in the forefront of my mind, considering my musical tastes veer more towards American Idol castoffs than any genre that lacks the belting of hypnotically catchy but artistically impoverished melodies.

Still, it’s a topic that keeps popping up in publications I’m reading. Just this week, Jonah Weiner asked in Slate “Where did all the female rappers go?” His conclusions generally center on a sociological-consumerist analysis of rap; after discussing most of the prominent female hip-hop acts of the last thirty years, he asks why they’ve made “so few lasting inroads” and answers:

For one thing, what most of the women mentioned above have in common is that their music rebuts and responds to guy-spun gender narratives. One effect of this is to make female rap seem second class, occurring outside the “real,” “primary” work of hip-hop canon building, even as it argues for first-class citizenship. When we hear the word rappers, we think of black males; they’re what feminists would call hip-hop’s unmarked category. This makes tough going for pretenders outside of this category, and it’s meant that many of the identities that female comers have carved for themselves—Boss’ gangsta bitch, Kim’s badass nympho, or, recently, Lil’ Mama’s lunchroom alpha girl—have registered as one-offs or fads. (We see the same thing with white rappers, whether it’s the Beastie Boys’ nerdy boogie or Eminem’s white-trash horror-core.)

Female rap artists fall outside the prevalent narrative of the genre, and so their musical identities are necessarily sub-par — and, one must assume, in less demand by the hip-hop CD buyer. This is necessarily a demand-side explanation: female hip-hop artists are less popular to consumers of the genre because their product is less “authentic.”

But there might be a more basic economic supply-side explanation, too.

In September, Entertainment Weekly’s Margeaux Wilson wrote an article called “BET and VH1 Present…Awards Shows Without Women”:

Next month, VH1 and BET will air lavish awards shows celebrating hip-hop’s finest, including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z. But here’s the catch: Neither the Hip-Hop Honors (airing Oct. 6) nor the BET Hip-Hop Awards (airing Oct. 23) nominated a single female rapper. Next year’s Grammys may also follow suit, since the Recording Academy nixed its category for Best Female Rap Solo Performance in 2005. Why aren’t hip-hop’s leading ladies getting their props? ”Quite frankly, it’s a numbers thing,” says Stephen Hill, BET’s executive VP of entertainment, music, and programming. ”There were fewer than five videos submitted for the awards by female artists this year. None of them made the cut.’

But why are there so few? One source quoted in the article offered a very interesting perspective on the question:

Hair and makeup is killing female hip-hop…The grooming cost to break a female rapper versus a male rapper is 10 times as much per appearance. That tends to have an adverse effect on a record company’s willingness to even entertain a female rapper.

Could it really be as simple as this? If what the source says is true, then there’s a supply-side economic argument to be made for the dearth of female rappers. If rappers are generally launched by record companies, then — all else being equal re: the potential success of an act — the cheaper act to launch will be preferable.

One could point to popular female pop acts to refute this assertion, but it seems that the sex appeal and vocal range of female pop stars makes them better financial bets than their male equivalents; female rap artists don’t seem to have any comparative advantages over male rappers when it comes to factors that will drive sales of their records.

In this case, it wouldn’t have to be a fact that consumers are less interested in female rap artists than male ones — they would only have to be equally interested in the two. Then, given equal chances at profitability, the record companies would be incentivized to launch acts with fewer associated launch costs.

It’s hard to know how profound the Hair and Makeup Effect might actually be for aspiring female hip-hop artists, but it could offer profound and simple insight into the under-representation of women in the hip-hop world.

Yom Kippur is always an introspective time for me, however lacking I may be in observance. (Most Jews go to services and fast; I generally do one or the other, figuring either way I’ve got my atonement covered.)
 
As I ruminate on my moral failings from the preceding year, I’m always fascinated by how much more inclusive of sin is my religious moral sense than is my secular moral sense: behaviors that I wouldn’t normally think of as wrongdoing still set off my religious alarm as atonement-worthy.
 
Take gossip. During the year, my borderline-unhealthy obsession with ethics and etiquette keep me pretty primed to speech and actions I find objectionable. Still, I generally don’t have any qualms about talking about people behind their backs.
 
I’m of course more comfortable gossiping about people I don’t like than people I do, and I don’t like rumor-mongering or judging people too harshly without thinking deeply about their perspectives and circumstances. But, I think trading insights with friends about other friends and acquaintances is anthropologically interesting, socially bonding (and entertaining), and important for staying apprised of our friends’ emotional states and for strategizing collectively about how to help each other out.
 
At Yom Kippur, though, palpable guilt washes over me. Judaism strictly forbids gossip — in a prohibition called lashon hara — and though my secular ethics alarms aren’t set off by gossip, I’m always sure during atonement that G-d doesn’t want me to be talking about anyone behind their backs.
 
This dissonance raises an interesting point: is it morally okay to gossip? If not, why not?
 

Lying and Our Negative View of Gossip
 
The knee-jerk reaction is to say that, though we all do it all the time, gossip’s a vice we should try to curb — something to make resolutions about come New Year’s. For support of this position, we can see religious proscriptions like lashon hara.
 
The proscription is supported by our sensible distaste for lying, often tied up in gossip that entails propagating rumors we’re not sure are true. We are commanded religiously against bearing false witness; lying ranks as a top-ten sin, showing its select place as a more blameworthy subset of gossip more generally.
 
It’s clear even from a secularly ethical standpoint that slander is blameworthy. One’s good name is an essential part of his social identity — to sully someone’s name without giving him the opportunity to defend himself could be a violation of his sovereignty, just as scarring as a physical violation of his person. Both will cause pain and impair the victim’s ability to function successfully in the world.
 
We’ve institutionalized this idea in the law by requiring that defendants in civil and criminal trials be able to face their accusers (or, as the sixth amendment reads, the right
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him”). And we see it in reality shows every day when Hannah or Sheena demand that if you have something to say about them, you should say it to their face.
 
From an evolutionary standpoint, scientists have highlighted the importance of reputation for group cooperation. From a Times article describing Harvard studies of cooperation:
 
“People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.”
 
We’ve evolved to help each other out rather than to only fend for ourselves — cooperation is essential to building complex societies; we can achieve more collectively than we ever could each on his own. And when working collectively, we need mechanisms to demonstrate to the community that we will not screw others over for personal gain when given the opportunity. It’s dangerous to have bad things said about you behind your back.

 
The Instrumental Importance of Gossip
 
 So, slandering someone’s reputation, lying about them, or generally charging them with fault without giving them the opportunity for rebuttal is bad — atonement-worthy. But, as I said above, slander is just a small slice of gossip. When my friends and I talk about a third party, we’re not spreading lies — we’re doing analysis. What do we think of this person? Are our judgments just? Why does he behave in a certain way? How should he behave?
 
In a sense, exchanging ideas about a person is the way we determine whether our personal conceptions about him or her hold up to scrutiny. It makes me think of a wonderful Louise Glück poem called “Birthday.” The key stanza reads:

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

When we don’t share our ideas about people with others, when we keep our conceptions and judgments to ourselves, they are untested — we have to gossip to know whether or not to revise our opinions and to reach better ones.
 
Think of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Gossip is instrumental in Elizabeth’s learning more about why Darcy behaves with such stoic coldness, and in her discovering why Wickham’s ostensible charm is not proof of an unblemished character.
 
Think also of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the public sphere — where we discuss ideas and challenge each other’s ethical and political views — is essential to the maintenance of a successful society, because the testing of one paradigm against others (through communication) is how those paradigms are refined and brought closer to the truth.
 
If I have one opinion about X based on my interactions with her, and my friends A, B, an C have other opinions about X — each, of course, influenced by A, B, and C’s own prejudices and epistemological immodesties — coming together around a coffee shop table and talking about X is how we realize that our individual opinions are not monolithic.
 
Discussing this question earlier today with my good friend Kara, I was struck by a good point she made: usually, when we’re talking about X, we’re not just talking about X — we’re talking about our relationships with X. Whether X is a friend, family member, or significant other, we are implicated in this relationship ourselves. Isn’t it unreasonable to expect us not to openly discuss relationships of which we are a part? Are we violating X’s right to privacy in doing so?

And this begs the question, is talking about X a violation of his or her right to privacy? Or some other right? Let’s say John is talking to his friend Tom about his other friend Mary. Mary overhears and becomes offended — does she have grounding to be? Yes, Mary is being discussed behind her back, but in essence John is seeking advice from Tom about his own life, and naturally his life is bound up in his relationships with people like Mary.
 

 Gossip and Etiquette
 
Let’s step back from ethics. Is it rude to talk about someone, i.e. Mary, behind her back?
 
Etiquette, like religion, is more inclusive of wrongdoing than is a humanist ethics. It’s rude to ask an acquaintance his salary, but it’s not a moral wrong. It might be rude not to send a thank-you note after receiving a gift, but it’s not grounds for sanction.
 
The function of etiquette is indeed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable. Though we lack a moral obligation to prevent discomfort — such an obligation would be impossible to uphold and would be unfairly contingent on each person’s idiosyncrasies of sensitivity — it’s nice and socially lubricating to prevent discomfort and to show each other respect, thus not asking about salaries and sending thank-you notes.
 
Indeed, etiquette is not about what forks to use — it’s Hippocratic: First do no harm. A gentleman, as Cardinal Newman said, is one who never inflicts pain. And, as Slate’s review of Laura Claridge’s new Emily Post biography reminds us said, Emily Post “often said etiquette had much more to do with ‘instinctive considerations for the feelings of others’ than with using the right fork, and she herself was famous for putting her elbows on the table.”
  
But talking about a friend behind her back doesn’t inflict pain or hurt anyone’s feelings. Indeed, the problem with John being overheard by Mary is not the speech — it’s the being heard. Being aware of being talked about makes Mary uncomfortable. It’s not ungentlemanly to talk about someone behind her back; it’s ungentlemanly to get caught.
 
Yes, it’s unpleasant to think of your friends or girlfriends/boyfriends talking about you behind your back, but can you blame them? Do you want them to leave their own lives unexamined? The unexamined life, we know, is not worth living.
 
Still, it’s a foggy question that leaves us ambivalent. Kathy Griffin says she’s uncomfortable when the subjects of her comedy tell her to say it to their faces. “I was raised right,” she says. “I talk about people behind their back. It’s called manners.” We laugh because we think she’s copping out, but a deeper analysis suggests that maybe she was raised right after all.