Urbane Sprawl

The English have an unhealthy obsession with celebrity (and, in their case, royal) gossip that shames even our American fascination with the private lives of Britney, LiLo and Sam, Katie and Tom, Madonna and ARod. TMZ, Page Six, and Perez pale in comparison with the British broadsheets that carry gossip as news — Paris Hilton is no Princess Di. At the same time, though, the English have an uncommon (in our brutish American eyes) preoccupation with politeness and reserve.

There’s a fascinating book called “Watching the English” by anthropologist Kate Fox, a book that in essence is an anthropology of Englishness for the lay reader. It’s a bestseller in England and highly entertaining to American readers who like to laugh at those different from them. (And don’t we all?) I encountered it yesterday while browsing for books, and it got me thinking about the social importance of gossip.

Fox highlights how reserved the English are: at a party, for instance, it’s considered highly inappropriate to go up to a stranger and introduce yourself — names are too intimate for a first encounter. Instead, one must drift into conversation and, at the end, say, “So sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” Indeed, talking about oneself or expecting to hear details about someone else is strictly out-of-bounds.

As a result, neutral “grooming-talk,” as Fox calls it (referencing monkeys that groom each other as a form of social interaction even when grooming is unnecessary), takes center stage in English social life. It’s why conversations about the weather are so central to English interaction; weather is an easy, uncontroversial, shared topic that allows for the kinship of agreement (“Yes, it is cold!”) and thus social lubrication.

Fox points to two possible explanations for the English national obsession with gossip that relate to the phenomenon of English reserve. First, she says that English reserve makes indulging in gossip illicitly thrilling. Second, she says that private information is highly valued because it is generally so scarce.

But, skimming through Fox’s book, I was surprised that she left out the most obvious reason why celebrity and royal gossip is so important to society. It’s not because English reserve makes it illicit or highly valued — it’s because English reserve keeps almost all other possible topics of conversation off the table.

Gossip serves the same purpose as weather talk. Unlike talking about one’s personal life (off limits) or, say, politics and world affairs (too contentious), mentioning the latest tidbit or scandal from the royal family will be familiar to everyone with whom you’re interacting and will let you reach an easy agreement: “Shocking, isn’t it?” “Indeed.”

Americans, too, need common cultural currency with which to interact, so we can start a conversation by saying, “Did you hear that Lindsay and Sam had a big fight on an Acela?” But, importantly, we have fewer problems with crossing social boundaries and engaging in possibly contentious conversation, so we’re just as likely to start a conversation with, “Did you see Sarah Palin on SNL?” even though that path will definitely lead to a political, possibly controversial place.

We’re also content to talk about ourselves. The other day, a cashier asked me what I did for a living. When I said I didn’t have a job, she asked how I paid the rent. Gauche for sure, but not out of the realm of American conversation you’ll encounter every day.

Just walking the streets of New York, my mother makes half-a-dozen new friends every day. This weekend she chatted with the girl behind the counter at the cupcake shop about how business is great but exhausting because she works seven days, well two days here and classes five days a week, yep she’s studying at Manhattan Marymount, etc., then she left the shop and stated chatting with a woman on the street about her beautiful flowers, but they’re heavy, and yes it is hard to find a cab at this hour…

Bottom line: in America, our penchant for celebrity gossip is kept in check because of our readiness to talk about anything from our personal lives to politics. We demand celebrity gossip stories from our news media, but we also demand more contentious news; and our demand for all news is checked by our primary fascination: ourselves.

But no matter the culture, celebrity gossip serves as an essential social lubricant. I can meet someone from across the country who shares none of my political, religious, or social views, but we can still talk about Madonna and ARod.

Imagine you have ten friends. They all have interesting lives, go on adventures, think deep thoughts. You love to get together with each one and hear everything they have to say.

But then the friends slowly start to change. They realize that it’s expensive and tiring to go on adventures and think deep thoughts.

Let’s say two become story filters. They’ve heard everything that the remaining eight friends are doing, and they tell you the coolest stories and deepest thoughts. You don’t have to talk to those eight people anymore — you can just talk to these two!

But then three more convert. They become commentators. There are five people left still doing stuff; the commentators look at the stories the filters are talking about and reflect on them — snidely or thoughtfully. It’s easier for them to talk about what the OTHER friends are doing than to actually DO stuff themselves.

Indeed, filtering and commentating is so easy that more and more of your friends convert. Five, four, three… now only a fraction of your friends are doing or thinking anything! But, the few things left being done and thought are getting a lot more organization and dissection.

What’ll happen? Eventually, perhaps, there won’t be ANY original adventures or thoughts.

Of course, this is what’s happening with online media.

This week saw the launch of The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new web venture. (Which, incidentally, is already having some problems.) The site’s tag-line is “Read This Skip That,” and it’s premise is that it “curates” the web into what is “provocative and essential,” according to managing editor Edward Felsenthal.

The Beast has very little original content, instead offering a “cheat sheet,” which highlights the big stories on the web each day, and a “big fat story” section, which attempts to illuminate all angles of the day’s biggest story with links to a dozen or so links from different sources.

The Daily Beast is just more evidence that, increasingly, the A’s and B’s of the web are outweighing the C’s. Here’s what I mean.

A is for Aggregators:
Aggregators like The Daily Beast or Digg or Real Clear Politics just compile and “curate” the articles on the web and/or organize them in new ways. For instance, Digg is all user-based: readers vote articles up or down, and so the most popular articles are at the top. Real Clear Politics is all editor-based: the website presents the most interesting (in their eyes) political stories of the day. The Daily Beast does a little of both: its cheat sheet sums up the biggest stories of the day, then lets readers vote them up or down on the cheat sheet page. These are your filter friends.

B is for Blogs
Blogs are all about linking to other stories, and so they are in a way aggregators themselves. But they produce more original content. This content, though, is just reflection on, jokes about, judgments of, etc., other sources’ original reportage or rumination. Paradigmatic example: Gawker links to a New York Times article and then says something snarky about it. These are your commentator friends.

C is for Content
Original content. Like a New York Times article. Or a conventional-wisdom-challenging opinion piece on Slate. These outlets require paying reporters or writers and then editing their work. Much harder than aggregating or commentating. These are your remaining doers and thinkers.

So, the apparent trend of C’s to A’s and B’s: Good or Bad thing?

The Slate article about The Beast’s launch said, in response to Brown’s claim that the site isn’t just an aggregator:

Brown protests too much. Aggregating carries no shame: Sites that exist primarily to link to other sites embody the Web in its purest form. Linking is the soul of the Web, and the companies that recognized this early have seen enormous success. (Yahoo was a thriving Web directory before it was a corporate tragedy.) The online-news business came to prominence on the back of outbound links—you may have first visited Matt Drudge’s page for unsourced Clinton administration gossip, but if you kept coming back, it was for his irresistible tabloid eye. …

Brown is correct that all aggregators are as much about what they omit as what they include. Omission, indeed, is their primary feature—you go to the Daily Beast or BuzzFeed or HuffPo because they’ve already scanned through the news, gossip, funny videos, games, and assorted ephemera that hits the Internet each day and will presumably give you just the good stuff. In this light, “Does the world need another aggregator?” is as silly a question as “Does the world need another map?” The answer is always yes—different people need different guides for different purposes. And as the Web expands, with more people posting ever-stupider stuff each day, we’re only going to need more, and better, aggregators.

So this view of web media says that you’re not losing your doing and thinking friends to aggregation; you’re just making NEW friends who are commenting on the adventures and meditations of your original ten. And since The Daily Beast is a brand new site, it does seem that we’re just making a new friend, getting a new map, or [insert your metaphor of choice].

But this optimism ignores our sneaking suspicion that there is only a finite amount of media out there to be distributed amongst aggregation, professional blogging, and content creation — there are only so many readers, so there is only so much money with which to pay a finite amount of writers, editors, etc. Put simply: you only have ten friends.

Instead, the conversion hypothesis is supported by other recent events. Take this story from Gawker about a prominent group of Alt Weeklies switching from doing original criticism to blogging and aggregation:

Eason wants his alt-weekly writers to spend all week writing for the web—being bloggers, in essence—and then, at the end of the week, somebody pulls the best bits from the website and puts them together to create the print edition.

Problem: These cities don’t need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world. Shit, how much original content is left in Atlanta, anyhow? In DC, the City Paper has already stopped running cover story features. Is it raining pigs? I believe it is.

Again: we don’t need more bloggers. Content is really much more worthwhile. Invest in it. Any asshole can blog, shit. You have reporters. Use them!

Which is it? Will we, someday soon, lose our original content altogether?

Blogging and aggregation are obviously the dominant strategy for new and existing publications. They’re cheaper, easier, and very popular. Original reportage and criticism are harder and more expensive.

But I’d argue that it’s impossible for this trend to continue to its logical conclusion. Instead, there will have to be an equilibrium. If there’s nothing to blog about and aggregate, it will become worthwhile to shift (back) to original content creation, to fill the vacuum.

Still, this equilibrium might leave us with many fewer content creators than would be optimal for how collectively informed and thoughtful we are.

But we need content: it wouldn’t make sense just to have the “AB’s of Web Media,” would it?

I was intrigued today by an item from Details Magazine‘s “Know and Tell” page — basically, their attempt at a Harper’s Index.

The item was on contributions to presidential campaigns from “U.S. troops deployed abroad as of June 30, 2008, according to campaign-finance filings released in August.”

The three amounts shown in the Details “infographic” are:

– $60,642 for Obama
– $45,512 for Ron Paul
– $10,665 for John McCain

The clear implication is that troops abroad prefer Barack Obama to John McCain — and even prefer Ron Paul to John McCain. This is supposed to be surprising given the stereotypical alignment of the GOP and our armed forces and given the supposed Republican advantages in matters of defense.

But these implications are suspect.

Most importantly, these numbers reflect contributions from the primaries, not the general race. So really all we’re seeing is that servicemen and women overseas were more engaged in the race for the Democratic nomination than in the race for the Republican nomination. And, really, who wasn’t?

Moreover, there were many more serious candidates on the Republican side — McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, Ron Paul — while the Democratic race was really a two-way contest, or three if you include John Edwards. So, it makes sense that contributions from trops for any given Republican candidate would’ve been smaller than for any given Democratic candidate.

An important number we’re missing is contributions to Hillary Clinton. If that number is near Obama’s receipts, than we know that these numbers really just reflect greater engagement with the Democratic race.

Also, let’s do a thought experiment: say these contributions were from after the nominees were determined. Would that mean that service-people actually preferred Obama to McCain?

I’d argue that the answer is no.

It’s possible of course that a majority of troops support Obama. But more giving to Obama than to McCain might only reflect a lot of giving from a still-minority segment of troops abroad who are Democrats or who support Obama.

How could this be? Maybe there are economic differences between troops who lean Democrat/Obama and troops that lean Republican/McCain, making the former group more able to contribute to the candidate of their choice.

Or, more interestingly, maybe, for Democratic service-people, contributing to their candidate is a salient way to express their Democratic identity in a milieu where the men and women around them all prefer Republicans.

In any case, that’s all thought-experiment speculation. What’s important is that these numbers don’t really tell us anything.

For the third week in a row, Saturday Night Live opened with a sketch featuring the brilliant Tina Fey as the less-than-brilliant Sarah Palin.

It’s getting to the point that we all wait breathlessly for Saturday night to see how they’ll lampoon the events of the week, so we’ll finally know exactly how to feel about them. It can be a difficult wait. Of all the emotions I felt watching the sketch — mostly mirth peppered with pangs of depression — the most palpable emotion was relief.

I was relieved to see the SNL sketch just like I was relieved to read the New York Times editorial waking us up to the reality of Palin’s poor performance — both gave voice to exactly what I was feeling about the debate, showing that not everyone was watching the win/win event the pundits saw.

Before that, I was frustrated by the media’s reflecting a reality that I wasn’t subscribing to, but I had no outlet for that unarticulated frustration until reading the Times editorial and then, come Saturday, watching SNL.

I bet a lot of other people were feeling the same frustration I was. But many more of those people probably saw the SNL sketch than read the Times editorial.

I think people are turning on SNL in record numbers not just because the sketches are funny, but because they fulfill an essential social role: The Fey-as-Palin phenomenon — now Palin wants to appear on SNL impersonating Tina Fey! — has me reminded just how powerful pop culture can be as our collective voice — in this case, establishing by Sunday morning the accepted narrative of the preceding week’s events; and, in general, reifying to society as a whole what each of us might be feeling and thinking.

Indeed, SNL was so powerful in shaping the narrative of media’s biased coverage of Obama during the primaries that Hillary Clinton actually started sounding like Amy Poehler’s parody.

I talked about this phenomenon already in one my Crimson columns, here, and identified it — with the help of Steven Pinker — as akin to the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. When he laughs at the naked emperor, he is vocalizing the unarticulated knowledge of everyone too shocked and nervous to speak up about their leader. As Pinker writes in “The Stuff of Thought”:

Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.

SNL is speaking up, laughing, telling the emperor she has no clothes — and telling all of us that it’s okay to laugh along.

The vice presidential debate last night was the closest thing to event television we’ve had since the American Idol finale, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I think many people did.

Beyond the unsettling post-debate punditry that gave Governor Palin props for speaking in semi-coherent sentences — even when those sentences had little content and blatantly ducked the questions asked, questions on topics about which she was clearly uninformed and inarticulate — I was put off by the very fact of the debate’s “event” status.

We kept hearing Brian Williams and the others say that this was the most highly anticipated vice presidential debate in modern times. (Of course, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more pressing vice presidential debate in “pre-modern times,” whatever those might be.) But the vice presidency really should not be so important, and its candidates should not be so distracting. John Adams was right when he said that the vice presidency was “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

Really, the essential role of the VP is to be able to assume full responsibility for governance in a time of national crisis (after the death or assassination of a sitting president). This idea was summed up expertly by Nate Silver of The New Republic.

It’s obscene how much time and energy the media — and the electorate — spend thinking and talking about the VP. The choice of a VP nominee is the ultimate horse-race, all about personalities and electoral maps, little about policy substance, and so of course it’s exciting to talk about around the water cooler. But the media ignores the solid social science that assures us that no one votes for a candidate because of their VP; when election day comes, it really doesn’t matter whose name is below the nominee’s.

So, the vice presidency isn’t really important, it’s distracting, and — as Joe Biden said of the current administration, in which the VP seems to hold more ideological sway over the course of policy than the president himself — it can be dangerous. What do we do?

The answer is actually elegantly simple. We can add meaning and purpose to the office of the vice presidency while also restoring it to its proper place as topic of minimal concern during elections and position of minimal importance during administrations.

How? Repeal the twelfth amendment.

If you’ve forgotten, that’s the amendment that makes us vote for a president and vice president as a ticket. In 1804, that system replaced the constitution’s original design that made the second-place finisher in a presidential election the vice president of the United States.

If we repealed the amendment now (with just a 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 states), then come January we’d have either President McCain and Vice President Obama or President Obama and Vice President McCain.

It might sound absurd when you first think about it, but after a little reflection it makes perfect sense:

Our winner-take-all electoral system is institutionally designed to breed rage. Just think: 49.99% of the electorate can vote for a presidential candidate and still see their man or woman lose — resigned to a simple Senate seat or, gasp, public life. Hell, a majority of voters can elect one candidate (Al Gore) and be left with nothing when the Supreme Court gets around to deciding the winner.

It’s no surprise that RAND reports rising partisanship or that there’s an increasing resentment that accompanies the in-party/out-party polarization: Gallup reports that only 26% of Americans have confidence in the presidency and a pathetic 13% in Congress.

With the twelfth amendment repealed, half the nation would still get to see their party represented in every administration, albeit with a role that would surely be diminished with respect to policy design and implementation. But that’s the role as it should be — the president has tons of advisors and staff; the vice president is symbolic and is only meant to be able to take over in a crisis.

Surely that’s what the founders intended: who better to be next in line to take over the presidency than the person who almost half of Americans think is ready to be president? Why allow someone plucked from obscurity, who gets no vetting by the American people, be — as they say — a heartbeat away?

Historically, the twelfth amendment is seen as having been a necessary solution to adapt the electoral system to the party politics that sprung up around 1800, surrounding the fierce race for president between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (Before that, George Washington had been elected unanimously — twice.)

I’ll spare you the full history, but suffice it so say that after Adams won and Jefferson became vice president, Jefferson’s ideological distance from Adams made him unwilling to play any role, and so he walked away from the office completely. By the time 1804 rolled around, the parties were using de facto tickets in which men clearly meant to be the vice presidents for the major candidates (again, Adams and Jefferson) had their names entered into consideration for president, with one elector on each side dropping his vote for the VP candidate to make the intended ticket finish one-two.

A historical fluke — someone forgot to drop their vote for Jefferson’s VP pick, Aaron Burr, and so the two men tied for the presidency until the House of Representatives finally anointed Jefferson — sprang Congress into motion to create the amendment which has ensured that such a snafu never happens again.

So, really, the amendment served only to reify the nascent partisanship in the country — not to address it. Rather than forcing us to throw representatives from different parties into office together and heal their wounds, we have an electoral system that gives a big stamp of approval to the fierce separation of parties that now seems unbridgeable. And, indeed, as Arthur Schlesinger so clearly articulated in 1974:

The Twelfth Amendment sent the vice presidency into prompt decline. The first two Vice Presidents had moved on directly to the presidency. After the amendment was enacted, the vice presidency became a resting place for mediocrities.

What would change for the worse if we got rid of the twelfth amendment? Not much, I think.

We wouldn’t have to think about the veepstakes, and we could focus on the men and women at the top of the ticket. We’d know that no party would suffer a total loss on election day — with their voices totally shut out from government — because the nominee from the losing party would still hold office.

Sure, there’d be pundit chatter about how McCain and/or Obama is really more suited to the vice presidency because of X, Y, or Z — but likely that wouldn’t change anyone’s mind about who they wanted the true leader of the nation to be. The VP could become a national symbol for bipartisanship, put in charge of non-partisan initiatives that they have expertise in — for example, VP Obama could rally youth to service, while VP McCain could be the face of services for veterans.

Of course, it would be a job that no one really wanted. But, that’s how it’s been for over two hundred years.

In an earlier post I talked about the impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for improving the quality of new hires into the industry.

Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.

During a car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the newspaper every day, but she didn’t have the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!

Well, why can’t she?

The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.

Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the local and even national TV news and news radio lack this quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the Times Online.

Add to that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to them while I walk around.

So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for each article. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for the dozen or so articles in each section — a Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).

I don’t subscribe to the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the day’s headline article read to me.

Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a much wider variety of news than when I click around the articles that pop out on me on the website.

Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and then we don’t have to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.

Bottom line: with minimal effort and expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the news. New revenue abounds.

Update (10/1/08): So it turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.

A train is barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a fat man in front of a train to save the passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that some things — like selling photos of your child or pushing a man in front of a train — are simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is the net good done by an action — saving a trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to be popular.

What stands out most, though, is the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Over the last few years, most mainstream doubt about the existence of climate change has been quelled — just think about Al Gore, Nobel Prize Laureate — and only the most strident of zealots resist the coalescing consensus that the activities of man are adversely affecting our environment.

As a result, I was surprised and intrigued to hear from a friend over dinner recently that her boyfriend — a Harvard business school student who holds numerous science degrees, including a master’s from Cambridge — is resistant to the forecasting that appears in major scientific publications like Science and Nature.

No one’s accusing these publications of being anything less than rigorously peer-reviewed bastions of scientific research, so why disbelieve them?

My friend said her boyfriend felt that lots of good, legitimate research is done on climate change, but the publications — and the media at large — focus on the extreme, the provocative, and so it’s the most pessimistic views that end up in their pages.

This makes perfect sense: the research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the most interesting to prospective readers.

It’s a case of the classic economic phenomenon known as The Winner’s Curse.

Let’s say there’s an auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the mean estimate, but it’s the buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

Last week, New York ran a story by Boris Kachka about the impending demise of book publishing. It was called, depressingly, “The End.”

Lips are abuzz within the industry about the myriad forces that, like so many tribes looking to sack Rome, will weaken the centuries-old industry enough to banish print to the history books:

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

The article got me thinking about one force that I think has been overlooked. And even if it has nothing to do with the end of print, it’s an idea that’s led to a broader pseudo-economic theory that I call The Too Many Suitors Problem.

The print media is an industry that enjoys a large surplus of aspirant labor. Even while book publishers and newspapers shrink, the number of doe-eyed Ivy League graduates who want to board those sinking ships is growing. We need only look to reports-cum-cautionary-tales like Doree Shafrir’s in the Observer, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” to understand how competitive entry-level jobs are in this industry.

But while it may seem like a boon to have the best and the brightest at the disposal of Human Resources departments everywhere, I’d argue that this large surplus of labor is actually a detriment to the quality of the young blood coming into the industry — the young men and women who could conceivably bring print into this, our new millennium.

At first blush, this probably makes no sense: the quality of the new class of media types should be better if the hiring companies have a bigger pool to choose from. But let’s take a step back.

Imagine you are a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. You have two suitors to choose from, and a finite amount of resources (in this case, time before you become un-marriageable) to make your choice. At first you think one is an asshole and one is charming, but, after a little more time and a few stalled marriage proposals, you realize that the charming one is immoral and the asshole is actually the man of your dreams. (Spoiler: your name is Elizabeth Bennet.)

Now imagine the same scenario, but you have 200 suitors instead of two, and you still have the same few years before you’re labeled spinster. The mechanism you’d have to develop to choose between the suitors would be much cruder than originally — instead of getting to really know each suitor, you’d have to do thirty-second interviews with each one (like they do on the first episode of the Bachelorette each season). With the same amount of time, but with a surplus of 199 suitors instead of a surplus of 1, you might completely miss Darcy in the pack. Especially since he’d give a bad first impression.

And that’s the crux of my Too Many Suitors theory: at a certain point, a surplus of labor supply (for skilled labor) will lead to a diminishing quality of the group ultimately selected. And this is because, as the surplus increases, the mechanisms for measuring quality become necessarily more crude.

Imagine you have a play with five characters to cast. You want more than five people to come audition, because if only five come and a few suck you’ll have a lousy cast. So maybe you want ten or twenty people to audition. But at a certain point, more auditionees will be detrimental: you’ll have to give each actor just a minute or two to read, and instead of gathering the amount of data necessary to see whether they are truly good actors fit for the roles, you’ll instead gather a smaller, much more chance-influenced amount of data; you’ll only know whether they happened to have a good reading of a one-paragraph monologue.

Here’s a concrete real world example about the cruder mechanisms that come along with too many suitors: Harvard gets a little more than half the number of applicants as the University of Michigan. Harvard, though it has to rely perhaps too much on SAT scores and class rank, gets to have an admissions officer carefully consider each applicant. UMich doesn’t have that privilege, since it gets nearly 30,000 applicants. Instead, it relies largely on a points system.

Obviously there is self-selection in the pools of applicants. But, I’d assert that if the 27,000-person pool applying to UMich were randomly cut down to the size of the pool applying to Harvard (16,000ish) and then the Harvard admissions office got to choose UMich’s freshman class, that class might be of an overall higher quality than the one they would get with their usual system and their bigger applicant pool.

We could do the same thought experiment for Harvard: cut the applicant pool in half and use the extra time and resources to let the admissions officers spend more time with the applications, get more essays and interviews, and ignore SAT scores. You might get a better freshmen class.

The Too Many Suitors Problem is, in some way, an application of the Tyranny of Choice (which asserts that having more options to choose between won’t necessarily make us happier) to the market for skilled labor, with Schumpeterian, i.e. self-undermining, consequences.

In print media, the sheer number of aspirants combined with the limited resources of the struggling companies means that the mechanisms used to filter people into the industry are crude and less meritocratic than they might be if the applicant pool were smaller. Job listings are posted on Mediabistro.com and on company websites as a formality; they’re filled instead through nepotistic connections and aggressive networking.

This isn’t sour-grapes complaining, though it’s true that during my junior year of college I applied to summer internships at the big publishing companies and never heard back. I promise I’m not bitter.

Instead, I understand the industry reality: this system is in the short-term interest of the companies. It’s simply easier and faster to fill positions this way — the alternative, filtering through the hundreds of summer internship and job applications and really trying to find the best candidates, would take far too much time and energy.

But perhaps it’s not in their long-term interest: because they can’t employ a truly meritocratic system, they are often scaring away the bright minds and high achievers who instead look to the clear(er) meritocracies of law school applications and i-bank recruiting. Those areas have large applicant pools but also have lots of seats to fill, so the proportionate size of the surplus is smaller than for the pressed-but-prestigious world of print, and so they’re equipped to handle the rush of prospective analysts and paralegals.

If newspapers and book publishers employed a truly energetic on-campus recruiting program at top-tier colleges, the short-term resource expenditure might pay back big time by getting the best applicants into the company walls — young minds who might be able to help fortify the industry’s walls against Kachka’s bogeymen and who might help figure out how to build print into a city for the future rather than a relic of the past.

What do infomercials and many political attack ads have in common?

They both change the way we think even though they employ words and imagery we all know to be blatantly false.

Last week, Saturday Night Live did a fake commercial based on my favorite infomercial convention: making simple everyday tasks, from peeling a potato to doing a sit-up, look Sisyphean. In the SNL commercial, Kristen Wiig just CANNOT get a jar open! In trying, she ends up accidentally killing her husband, burying him, lying to the cops, getting arrested, being convicted, then getting chased by dogs after breaking out of jail. “There’s got to be a better way!” she cries. Then in a clear color shot, she uses the “jar glove” to easily remove the lid. “Jar glove. The better way!”

Infomercials all seem to use this tactic: in black and white dramatizations, we watch unfortunate people with contorted faces flail this way and that in a desperate attempt to get the knife to move straight or to get their chests to meet their knees. We all know that these tasks are not this hard. We know these dramatizations are absurd. And yet they do seem to make those Tater Mitts and Ab Lounges more attractive.

George Orwell described the “schizophrenia” of “holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out.” And though we’re not schizophrenic when we watch infomercials, we do seem to inhabit a double consciousness, knowing that our lives are not the black and white ordeals we see onscreen but still feeling that they could be easier.

And we inhabit this same double consciousness when seeing, hearing, or reading malicious political attacks.

Two months ago, John McCain said that Barack Obama would “rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” This is a statement that no reasonable person, even a McCain supporter, would believe. Add to this other scurrilous rumors — Obama is secretly a practicing Muslim; he was childhood friends with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that are either conspiratorially unbelievable or quickly, easily falsified. Yet these clearly false attacks persist — probably because they are effective. We’ll likely see even more attacks like this in next six weeks; Fact Check is a good place to keep track.

Why are they effective? As John Bullock writes in his article “The enduring importance of false political beliefs”:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that they don’t. By this view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to be false…But findings from social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false.

Negative associations change our attitudes, even if these associations are as transparent as false rumors or impossible sit-ups.

The producers of infomercials know it’s true. Clearly, so do politicians.

It’s intriguing that simple lying might be as effective as aggressively spinning the truth. The conventional wisdom is that bullshit is much more invidious than bold-faced lies, being harder to refute. The manipulation of words and images, subtly misleading statements (like President Bush mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together, giving the impression that Iraq was somehow involved in the terrorist attacks), the framing of issues, etc., are supposed to be the most dangerous form of political maneuvering. But maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong.