By land, by sea, by dirigible...

Ah, spring break! What a faux-break; a week without classes is nice but it's bookended by midterms/other deadlines. I am enjoying being back home though. The kitchen is filled with my favorite treats (including my favorite study foods of all time, Trader Joe's naan and deli mozzarella... toast them together! It is delicious!), there is a spacious desk to spread out all of my stuff, and a bathroom mirror (unlike the one in the Frisc) where I can gaze upon my visage and not recoil in horror*. And my parents! They are nice too.** So, essentially, all environment variables have been adjusted to promote Most Efficacious Studying. Or Media Consumption. Let us now turn to the latter!

Sort of Relevant Things:
1. What Isn't For Sale? -Michael J. Sandel (The Atlantic, April 2012): I read this on the train back home. I'm not a huge fan. But three days later I am still contemplating it so I thought I'd share! Sandel argues that we have allowed the market to permeate too many spheres of life. He fears our sense of the intrinsic value of things is being eroded by our sense of their market value. He contends:

Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship. 

I thought the author's point was pretty interesting-- and definitely relevant-- but something about it just seems... wrong? I do not disagree with his thesis-- that there are spheres in life where the market does not belong-- but I do not think my personal opinions on the subject are something I should foist upon society at large. It seems a bit paternalistic. His use of the term "markets" and examples of why they are bad are also a bit nebulous at times. The whole Markets-Are-Bad thing isn't particularly new and Sandel doesn't add much to the argument. (His article is nice and short though, so it scores well in the readability aspect.)

from theatlantic.com

Also, it would be nice if he fleshed out his concept of non-markets. How do we decide which spheres to toss out of the market bin? What exactly is this alternative that he is proposing so cavalierly? Will it root out the corruption supposedly endemic to markets or simply replace it with a different version?

(Tangent: I really enjoyed reading Daddy Issues by Sandra Tsing Loh from last month's issue of The Atlantic. Besides being published in the same magazine as the piece above, there are no similarities.)

2. Can Aung San Suu Kyi, Now Free, Lead Burma to Democracy? -Rebecca Frayn (Newsweek, March 5, 2012): While the vows this week were not bad, this piece is even better! It's like an Us Weekly cover story on geopolitical 'roids. But seriously. It's inspiring! I'll admit, my knowledge of Aung San Suu Kyi only consisted of a few NPR reports from when she was released. I didn't know anything about her. Only that she was a really Important Person in Burma. This piece fleshes out the contours of her life nicely.

from the telegraph.co.uk

Switching back to vows though, there is something I would like to point out. The reporter just throws this line in somewhere in the middle of the story like its whatevs: 

Later that night, Ms. Gartland became Mr. Lomelí’s friend on Facebook and tried to make light of their intense encounter. “See you around the opera house,” she wrote breezily. 

Is the reporter familiar with the nature of Facebook Friend Initialization? One does not just friend request all randos one meets immediately after an encounter. She makes it sound like its something that naturally happens, like a flower blooming in spring or my Haus running out of hot water in the mornings. There are crucial details left out of this story! Did Lomelí friend request Gartland, causing her to respond back with her "breezy" message or did Gartland friend request Lomeli, with breeziness attached? Enquiring minds want to know! Having been the recipient of such a fb friend request (complete with breezy message) and being a sentient being on planet Earth I contend that these things are never breezy. Just saying. 


Things other people have recommended to me that I think are really great: 


3. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? -Mindy Kaling (November 2011): The book is great! Mindy is great! I can go on about this at length. I enjoy everything that she writes... about anything! I spent an entire evening last week going through the entire archive for her blog, Things I've Bought That I Love, and it was a glorious experience. (Caveat emptor:  I recently tried on Lucy yoga pants and they were not particularly flattering... I think I may have been sporting the looser hippie Mom version though.) Enough about this though, what I really wanted to point your attention to was our mutual admiration of Colin Firth:

Colin rocks his reindeer jumper in Bridget Jones's Diary. 

3.a. Mindy on Colin:  Colin has starred in two, nay, three, of my favorite Rainy-Day-Tub-of-Ice-Cream movies: Bridget Jones's Diary, Love Actually, and P&P (along with more serious flicks, like The King's Speech or The English Patient). I reference Colin almost as much as I reference Michael Moscovitz. Some of my favorite e-mails have involved Colin (if your pal draws a parallel between a boy and Colin, then it's a Big Deal; if there are Chick Flick quotations involved, then it's a Super Big Deal). Mindy puts it much more eloquently in the linked passage! It's an excerpt from the chapter "Non-Traumatic Things That Have Made Me Cry." Also, word on the street is that Mindy is developing a sitcom where she stars as a Bridget Jones-esque OB-GYN!


Peripherally related to Kony 2012:

 

4. Alms Dealers- Philip Gourevitch (The New Yorker, October 11, 2010):
The whole Kony 2012 thing sort of passed me by. I was aware that it was a phenomenon but never actually got around to watching the video. I read a few of the counterpoints though. Most of them focused on the questionable actions of Invisible Children specifically. But what about the big picture? I think it's worth asking, "Is humanitarian aid ever 'worth it'?"

In an interesting piece awhile back Gourevitch suggests that aid ultimately does more harm than good. He argues that while aid does alleviate suffering on an individual basis, it lowers the cost of war/inflicting pain on a mass scale for war-makers, thus resulting in more war and suffering. The former editor of the Paris Review puts it a lot more eloquently than I do, but this is essentially a problem of moral hazard (with really bad guys). Here is a pretty great passage (tricolon crescens fo' real):

Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, she [the author of the book Gourevitch is reviewing] argues, is “the logic of the humanitarian era.” Consider how Christian aid groups that set up “redemption” programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up the market incentives for slavers to take more captives. Consider how, in Ethiopia and Somalia during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, politically instigated, localized famines attracted the food aid that allowed governments to feed their own armies while they further destroyed and displaced targeted population groups. Consider how, in the early eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror, and misery upon Cambodians; and how, in the mid-nineties, fugitive Rwandan génocidaires were succored in the same way by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo, so that they have been able to continue their campaigns of extermination and rape to this day.

I wonder, are these problems endogenous to the concept of humanitarian aid?

Tangent: Did you know that Philip Gourevitch is married to fellow New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar?? She wrote a great profile on Derek Parfit a while back. Incidentally, Derek is married to Janet Radcliffe-Richards, who has written some really interesting stuff on organ markets. (I wrote a paper about organ markets for a public health seminar freshmen year which is why I find this game of 4 Degrees of JRR so fun!)

*Dear Architects of the SciLi: It is great that you considered the way the courtyards would be illuminated during the Vernal Equinox, but I think more time should have been spent pondering the Bathroom Situation. 
**Actually, they pop in all the time to chat about radon poisoning, rain gutters, and Nancy Drew dioramas they helped me make for a book report. It's inhibiting my ability to procrastinate efficiently!