A Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By

Upon watching Steelers-Ravens

2009-01-20T03:28:00.003-05:00

I love to travel. In this past year alone, I did Czech-Poland-Ukraine in March, 2008; Peru in August, 2008; China in December, 2008; and am now living in Europe. My ambition is to make it to Africa, probably Morocco and Egypt, by the end of my stint in Europe, so that I can claim to have been in five of the seven continents in the space of a year. And let’s just leave unsaid all the interesting things I’ve eaten during that space of time.

Yet yesterday I spent the better part of a night (it was rainy in London) watching an American football game. And I loved it.

It’s the same impulse that drives me to eat at least one McDonald’s meal almost anytime I go abroad.

I think most expats have it somewhere, that deep longing for something familiar and home like. In Peru, Cuzco, Jim and I thought it was so funny that the most popular bar in the central square was (drumroll) the British Pub! But it makes a certain amount of sense: you spend the entire day racking your brains, politely listening to other people explain their cultures to you, gamely trying the guinea pig that’s still got its claws attached to it, and, when the night comes, there’s an intense desire to go back and drink the same Guinesse that you know, love, and have drank all your life. (Note: I actually hate Guiness. Such a rich beer, and yet almost only half the alcohol of an actual real beer.)

That’s the basic tension for people like me. We’re bored by home. It’s why we leave in the first place. We’re bored by the same five restaurants on the same streets, with knowing what’s around every corner. We’re driven by a sense of wanting to be completely lost, with knowing that beyond our trusty Visa cards and folding maps, we’re alone and on our own. (I do admit that if the Visa card wasn’t there, it would be a lot more scary.) That feeling that it’s possible to be lost, and in fact the feeling of being lost and needing to find your way home in the cold, is one of the most exhilarating for me. (And I have the flu to prove it.)

But we do miss home. The ones we love. The friends we crave. The familiar meal that we know we’ll like. And in my case last night, the sports game where I knew all the rules, knew all the teams, knew all the history, and, in the end, knew what the score meant.

It meant that Pittsburgh won.

"Doing" London

2009-01-20T03:28:00.001-05:00

Just came back from “doing” London. The whole concept of “doing” a city seems a funny one, in retrospect. You go to the city, pop open a travel guide, find the series of sights that are acknowledged to be the city’s “must-see destinations,” and proceed to tick them off one by one. It’s bound to be a rather fruitless exercise. If anyone told me I could “do” New York by seeing Times Sq, Rockefeller, Broadway, Lincoln Center, and then round it off with a Statute of Liberty, I’d tell them that it’s the equivalent of eating a Ho-Ho and thinking it’s a French pastry. You simply don’t get the real experience of being a New Yorker. Yet, here I was, in London, working my way from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London, “doing” London. And of course, even in eating, I was self-consciously chugging down on the British ales (very good, warm and filling, but never bitter) and eating the fish and chips (terrible, the culinary equivalent of McDonald’s Filet of Fish, which of course it is).

Priya and Nathan, as my hosts, did take me around to East London, to the area around White Chapel around which there now exists a vibrant Bangladeshi community: supermarkets and Bollywood DVD stores, all there. (Of slight concern was the flyer on one of the store’s doors calling for the Islamic countries of the world to join together and defeat Israel. This whole Gaza affair has all tempers on flair.) There I did experience “real” London, in the sense that indigenous (can you call an immigrant community “indigenous”?) Londoners were chowing down on the same excellent grilled chickens and curries that I was. It’s “real,” non?

Of course not. I was still just a Chinese-American having a Bangeladeshi meal in a London restaurant with an Indian-American and a white Pennsylvanian. If you put it in words, the entire affair seems just that ridiculous; so many different identities intersecting together and gorging itself on excellent food. But certainly not “London,” not as my tour-guide in the Tower of London, a Yeoman Guard named Paul who was in the British army for two decades and as British as British gets, would think to London, as he recalls to us the lives and deaths of ancient Brits like Henry VIII and Anne Boyeln. Is “London” that history, and that heritage, preserved now in its buildings and its gorgeous crown jewels? (530-some carats on the Star of Africa; what a nice prize for colonialism.)

The idea of how does one actually experience a city, reach out and touch a city, to do morally intelligent tourism, is one that bothers me. Mostly it’s a function of the fact that a city itself has different faces: the historical, the modern, the native, the immigrant. And then, layered atop that, is the impossibility of penetrating any of those layers as a weekend visitor. Those layers present a public face to you: they let you glimpse them and eat their food. But no “Londoner” can sit you down and reveal himself. He can’t explain it either.

Most people living in a city would be hard pressed to define their city in words. I feel that in two and a half years of New York, I have some sense of it, of its rhythms, of its patterns. Some of it is functional: which subway goes where, imprinted as a map of the city. Some of it is intellectual: how do people here interact, who does what and who has what aspirations, which neighborhood means what. But the last part, that’s the part I can’t describe, some sense of comfort with the city and its people, some connection, some anthropomorphization of the city into an actual person that is possible to get to know beyond the stage of an acquaintance.

That last one is what one gropes with when visiting a city like London. Like meeting a stranger, it’s a subtle probing, beyond his social facts, into whether the two of you can become deep friends, whether the intangibles are there.

And in this one city, in that little glimpse, in that five-minute cocktail conversation, I liked what I saw.

Impressions from the first week

2009-01-11T13:07:00.002-05:00

Arrived in Paris last Sunday, the 4th, so been here exactly a week now. First week has mostly been consumed with setting up the daily necessities of life: moving into my new apartment, in the 15th arrondissment, getting a cell phone, etc. As Anna describes it, because of the language barrier, accomplishing even the simplest task is a moral victory. Choosing the right pricing plan at the cell phone shop, for instance, could induce a feeling of sheer joy. Of course, language barriers have their upsides: a panhandler just walked up to me in the McD's where I was typing, and I managed to avoid the awkwardness by explaining that I didn't speak French. Ignorance has its uses.

Travel Distances

2009-01-01T08:23:00.005-05:00

Thought I'd keep a running tally of how far I've traveled, based on distances from http://webflyer.com/ and Google Maps.

New York --> Shanghai: 11900 KM
Shanghai --> Xuzhou: 514 KM
Xuzhou --> Beijing: 749 KM
Beijing --> Paris: 8190 KM
Paris <--> London: 612 KM
Paris <--> Dublin: 784 KM
Paris <--> Istanbul: 2,250 KM
Paris --> Madrid --> Granada --> Seville --> Barcelona --> Paris: 3,291 KM
Paris <--> Vienna: 1030 KM

Running Total: 29,320 KM
Equatorial Circumference of Earth (my goal): 40,075 KM

returning "home"

2008-12-28T07:44:00.003-05:00

went back today to visit my grandparents in Sunning, a township within the metropolitan control of xuzhou, my hometown. my dad grew up in the area around Sunning and, today, due to an odd detour, we ended up visiting the middle school where his parents (my grandparents) used to work and where he used to live.

it's been thirty-odd years since he's lived there, and, according to him, they haven't upgraded the facilities much in the interim. the buildings are one-level, concrete, with peeling yellow paint. the insides of the rooms are dark, owing to the small-ish windows. students huddle in unheated rooms in rows of seats (even on a Sunday), with seemingly stacks of papers on their desks. and his old home was in the back of the school courtyard. it's two rooms, in the same concrete style.

how far we've come, in these three decades.

fashion in china

2008-12-26T20:33:00.003-05:00

went shopping a few days ago for clothing in china, a whole new wardrobe, actually, given that i had to leave most my clothes back in the states.

i find fascinating how brand obsessed people in china are. maybe it's an universal thing, but the chinese have certainly taken it to an extreme, or perhaps just its logical conclusion.

for one, almost nothing that you can buy will lack for a brand prominently displayed somewhere on the article. this was most noticable w/ dress shoes: i was trying to find a simple pair of black shoes, but every shoe had a small metallic logo with its maker on it. it didn't matter if the maker was some obscure brand out of guangzhou; they had to stick their brand prominently on the shoe itself. sweaters it was a bit easier to find non-branded ones, but in general, everything had one.

which then brings in the second part of the equation: how obsessed the fashion-makers seem to be with american and european brands. polo and lacoste seem to be the most prominent. rather than be content with letting those brands be, the chinese companies have generated countless imitation brands. i can't even count now how many different variations of lacoste's crocodile i've seen in my time here. and ironically, in comparing the prices, some of the imitators have become just as expensive as actual lacoste clothing.

in one particularly amusing moment last year, i went to stand in the mall that sold "Boss Wenbro" (or something like that). and when i asked if they were related to "Hugo Boss", the clerk proudly replied, "oh, that's the German Boss, we're the Italian Boss." If only the Italians knew they had their own "Boss" brand.

i wonder how long it will be before chinese fashion stops trying to parrot american brands, and start developing indigenous luxury brands. the worksmanship is there: after all, the american companies produce here too. the designs? that will take a while longer, but even there, chinese designers are starting to make their headway in the high fashion market. so how long until chinese mass fashion and consumers stop looking for the crocodile.

-----

as an addendum, i did end up buying yesterday a suit by a chinese brand. maybe it's not as simple as i made it out to be.

an all-american story

2008-12-25T04:56:00.000-05:00

15 hour flight from new york to shanghai. Sat next to a Mr. Chen. He was flying back to Fuzhou to visit his family for the first time in ten years. Ten years. A decade.

Why did he wait so long? Because he finally got a green card.

After a bit more prompting, he reveals more of his story. He came to the states ten years ago illegally. He went through a service that flew him around several destinations in the world: Singapore, Amsterdam, etc. That globe trotting established a record on his passport that made it more credible to U.S. immigration officials that he was a mere tourist. The cover succeeded; he entered the U.S. on a tourist visa and has never left, until today.

He first went to Chinatown, where he briefly stayed before finding a job with a hometown acquaintance. Off he goes to Albany. Starting in the restaurant business without having ever cooked a meal, he works his way up. Much as we in law go from intern to summer associate to associate to partner, so do they in the Chinese restaurant business go from bus boy to waiter to kitchen assistant to head chef. 70 hours a week: seven days a week, from 10 to 9, except on Sundays when it’s 10 to 5, and no paid vacation days. In the hot greasy mess that is the Chinese kitchen. The ultimate prize? Getting enough money to finance one’s own restaurant. So that you can be your own “lao ban.”

Bracket for a second the wider political questions that his journey encompasses. Just marvel at the willingness of this one man to subject him to a strange country, to an unknown ultimate destination, to menial labor at what was surely less-than-minimum wage, to near-complete physical separation from his family, and, did I mention, to bachelor-hood for all that time.

Something to think about for the next time I get Chinese takeout.

A journey of a thousand miles...

2008-12-16T22:26:00.001-05:00

...begins with being turned away from the consulate. Apparently my appointment at the French consulate did not go through, so I never made it past security when I went today. The online appointment system did not have another appointment available till the 31st. Had to go to the study abroad office, who, through a contact, managed to get me another interview Thursday.

The grand lesson? It's better to know who to call than what to do.

Moving Out, Pt. 1

2008-12-13T02:04:00.001-05:00

Just finished disassembling my desk; someone will be picking it up tomorrow around 8:30. I still remember buying it two and a half years ago: my parents (back when they were still in the states) and I shopping around, finding the perfect desk, shipping it up to New York. How much optimism did law school start with? And to an extent, it's been fulfilled: I find myself with the job that I'm happy with, with the friends that I'm happy with, with the life that I'm happy with. In countless ways I've been fortunate. And yet, still it's hard to let go of this desk, this first leap of faith into the optimism of 1L year.

Relaunch

2008-12-11T21:39:00.001-05:00

So let's start over again. I'm always reinventing myself, so it's only fair to subject my blog to the same ordeal.

In the next year, I plan to travel back to China, then to France, then graduate, then take the bar and become a recognized lawyer, and then off to the seas again, and then finally to settle back down in New York to work.

If I stick to the plan, which I never do, this blog will catalog that journey.

prague day 2

2008-03-15T05:31:00.000-04:00

spent most of day in kutna hara---old silver mining town that's reconfigured itself into a cathedral tourist town after the silver dried up a few centuries back. highlight was the massive cathedral, three spires and very cool looking. town itself was very picturesque, as in a post-card. came back, slept, and then went out to party. tasted banana beer, very good. then out to Cross, club in outskirts, and hung out w/very cool group of Swedes and a Czech chick. tasted absenth for first time. not impressed. bar didn't have the sugar or spoons, so we took it straight. bitter as hell.

\prague day 1

2008-03-14T01:54:00.000-04:00

arrived in city around 6 in morning. bus system impossible to figure out, and metro not much better. dropped things off in hostel and went for stroll along main shoppoing street is stare mesto, the old town. street is full of u.s. and european brands, completely given over to tourists. money changers everywhere. got good deal on exchange. went on then to the main square in old town, saw the various churches and towers. grabbed b-fast in good bakery. spent a lot of the day in the former jewish ghetto. the whole neighborhood was gentrified a century or so ago, so there's only six synagogues left. of those, the old-new synagogue, first built in 14th century, had the most historical resonance, while the spanish synagogue, built in a moorish style, takes the cake for beauty.

after jewish quarter, we went to lunch. had czech cuisine for first time, not impressed. heavy on meats and dumplings. dan also got cheated when the waiter short-changed him. we went back to hostel, rested up, and then went out later at night. dinner at this italian place, where i tried a four meat combo, all czech cooking---ham, pork, duck, and sausage. extremely heavy. made me swear off meat for a day. then tried to go to this supposedly 14th century beerhall, that ended up looking way too modern and bourgeois, and then to a jazz club, which was empty. were fairly tired so went back to hotel. slept for a couple of hours then jet lag hits. we go down to basement common room and meet erin, the girl who's sharing our room. she was completely smashed. good first day.

Why I like Obama

2008-02-24T01:47:00.000-05:00

Coming today after Hilary's angry vitriol about Obama's use of misleading campaign mailers, and after much soul searching about why I should like Obama, I just want to set my stance down.

To begin, I should say that I don't like Obama for all the usual reasons. 1) I don't think he'll "change" Washington, any more than Jimmy Smith, or now DNC-chair Howard Dean, or say Jesus Christ. 2) I don't find him an incredible speaker. Maybe because as a lawyer I study rhetoric, and maybe because I've never experienced him in person, I find his delivery slow, halting at times, and yes, lacking in substance. 3) I don't find the fact that he's half-black compelling (note how the "half-" is usually left out of the commentary). I think the symbolism is a nice side benefit. But I also think that we can have a lot of figurehead symbolism---Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Bill Richardson---without changing the fundamental racial inequities in this country.

So bear with me, this is my cynical/realist view.

A president has three main practical functions. 1) He is head-of-state, which means that he is the embodiment of America abroad and its chief diplomat and solider. 2) He is head of the executive branch and the administrative state. 3) He is a point-man for generating legislation and pushing through legislation through the bully pulpit. (There are other tasks, e.g. killer of thanksgiving turkey, but they're not important.) On all three tasks, I believe he would be superior to Hilary.

As head-of-state, I think we should look to his well-known talent as a conciliatory figure, someone who can listen to divergent positions, synthesis his own, and exercise persuasive authority. This talent has been attested to both by former colleagues of his at Harvard Law Review, as well as his students at U. Chicago, as well as those who've served with him in politics. It is also a talent that America, at this point, needs. For the past eight years, we've had a president who has liked to hear himself talk, and who has often turned a deaf ear to the international community. It is well-accepted by now that a different tack is needed: someone who can build consensus and engage in multi-lateral action, someone who is not reliant on the projection of [expensive] military force, someone who will listen first and talk second.

I believe that that person is Obama. Of the major candidates, he has come out and said that he will talk with Iran and Syria. Clinton has dismissed this as naive. But is it really? Given the influence of Iran, is it really possible to imagine a lasting peace that does not engage all the stakeholders, however morally objectionable we find them to be? Multi-lateralism, to me, means not only talking with those willing to listen, but finding common ground with those who don't. Can we be multi-lateral only among our "coalition of the willing"? Can we still afford that type of deafness? As commander-in-chief and chief diplomat, we need someone with Obama's people skills.

As chief executive of the administrative state, the area he is arguably weakest in, I still would argue he has proven his strengths. Note that neither candidate has any executive experience: not counting her years as wife-in-chief, Clinton's years were in the Senate, in a legislative role. And Obama has come out and stated that he is not a careful reader of paperwork. Yet their performances in the campaigns---their remarkably different abilities to organize and mobilize a political campaign---has shown me how much Obama might be trusted to run the machinery of the administrative state.

Compare their two performances. Clinton started off with name recognition and a database of fundraisers left over from Bill and from her own Senate campaign. Obama had to build a campaign from scratch. Clinton had front-runner status most of this race, with all the advantages that come with increased media coverage and better rally turnouts. Obama was the long-shot. Yet it was Obama who built an effective national grassroots campaign, Obama who learned the lessons from Howard Dean and made a truly Net 2.0 type effort that generated momentum and fundraising from non-conventional sources, and Obama who time-and-again won the "ground game" in states like Iowa. Simply put, Obama has run a much more effective and efficient campaign, one that played to his strengths, stayed on message, and avoided internecine conflict.

In contrast, we know from the fallout from the resignation of Clinton's campaign manager that her campaign was in some ways a picture of dysfunction. She picked a long-time loyalist to manage her campaign, without regard to the scope of the challenge. It was a campaign plagued by turf wars, by inconsistent messages, and by self-inflicted wounds. Would she be down in delegates now if she could've reined in Bill "Obama's a fairy tale" earlier? If she could've avoided the Obama-used-drugs fiasco? As someone who supposedly "works hard" and is incredibly focused on the details, one cannot help but note the sheer incompetence of a campaign that has veered from message to message, championing change one day and experience the next. If this is how her campaign is run, I don't want to see her White House.

Lastly, the President does have his own policy-agenda. Of course, this is not a Constitutionally allocated role, but I think the modern presidency, by virtue of the electoral mandate and the bully pulpit, has certainly become a source for initiating legislation and coaxing it through. And it is here where, admittedly, Clinton bears more credentials. She has been in the Senate longer, knows how it works, and has more bills to her credit.

In contra-pose, I believe that Obama---as has been demonstrated---would make better use of the bully pulpit. I see Obama (as much as I hate the comparison) as possessing the same gifts of communication as Ronald Reagan: a man who can truly bring to bear public opinion on an issue and inspire the people to follow. I frankly do not see Hilary being able to use the pulpit with the same effect.

On this score then, I would call them even, though with the note that while Obama may learn how to work the legislative process, I doubt Hilary will ever learn how to inspire an audience.

So that's my admittedly broad argument for Obama. I've tried to set a case for him that does not involve the words "change" and that focuses on his objective skills, rather than aspirational goals. I think in this campaign we can come to see them not as resumes, but as human beings each with their own strengths and weaknesses. And at this point in time, I think America needs someone like Obama, someone with the right skills-set for these perilous times.

A frivolous law-suit tort?

2007-06-13T22:59:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/us/14pants.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The lawsuit for the $64 million pair of pants brings to mind a question: what do we do about frivolous lawsuits? Keep in mind, even after the Korean couple wins this - and it is certain they will win - they will have to pay attorney fees to the tune of $200+ per hour. Sometimes, in order to avoid such fees and the possibility of large losses, defendants will settle potentially large suits, regardless of their frivolousness.

So is there a judicial remedy? I suggest a suit for frivolous lawsuits. These would be countersuits, which defendants can file at the same time of the original suit. In effect, this would be a settlement tool - the risk of financial loss now deters people from pursuing law suits when the law is heavily against them.

it's an open question why this suit wasn't dismissed in summary judgment.

To be good or to be clutch?

2007-06-05T20:54:00.000-04:00

This is a Machiavelli "to be loved or to be feared" question - if you had to pick, would you want a player that was good? or one that came through for you in the critical moments? And is there really as big a distinction as some people make it out to be?

On the side of "good" are your Dirk Nowitzcki's, A-Rod's, and pre-2007 Peyton Manning: players that at one point or another lead the league in kiss-ass stats but, at the critical moments, couldn't take their game to the next level. We're not just talking giving out mediocre performances. In Dirk's case, we're talking monumental meltdown to the point where Avery Johnson told him to quit bitching and start leading. A-Rod is self-explainatory here. In Peyton's case, we're talking sideline fits watching his defense which then turn into wild hailmary's. (Keep in mind, even in the 2007 AFC, he had a first quarter meltdown before coming back and winning the game.)

Think, for a second, of one of the now old Bulls-Jazz series where, with the game on the line, Karl Malone went to the line for the game tying free-throws. Pippen goes and whispers in his ear "The Mailman doesn't deliver on Sundays." And the mailman misses. Twice. (People seem to forget that - however great MJ was - the Jazz were ALWAYS close in their series; but MJ always pulled it off in the decision time.)

Andy Roddick, Phil Mickelson, every sport has them. Good, Great players. Who just don't finish the deals.

On the side of "clutch" are the players that do their best work when the game/series/season is on the line. LeBron's recent playoff performance is one, with 41 points in a game where EVERY piston was guarding him. MJ, Kobe, Brady and Vinateri - players that are already good, but that in the key moments of a game go into overdrive mode. These are players that know that every person on the other team is gunning for him, and yet still puts up the big numbers, because they LOVE the spotlight.

i bring up this point because i've noticed that this is probably a distinction that carries to non-athletic pursuits. i tutor the LSATs, and one frequent complaint i get from students is test-time anxiety. otherwise good students who, when the time begins to tick, start panicking, start making mistakes. other students, on the other hand, actually do better on test day - they focus more, read more carefully, their brain works on overdrive, and suddenly their score jumps a few more points from every diag that they take.

now, here's the dilemma: it might sound like you'd always want "clutch" players, since they perform when it counts. but clutch players can also start taking their "clutch-ness" for granted. see Pistons or the Heat. In the Piston's case, they seem in playoff series to always win the first few games, let down their guard, and end up having to fight their way back. In the Heat's, they don't even bother showing up for the regular season. It works, but it also risks embarrassing failures to launch.

with students, a clutch student just assumes that he'll do better on the actual test, so doesn't bother studying up for the test.

so which is better?

Law: commerce clause

2007-04-30T17:14:00.000-04:00

what is "commerce"? This is the question plaguing the Supreme Ct's recent Lopez and Morrison decisions, which restricted Federal commerce power to areas which were commercial.

My intuition comes from economics, based on the idea of externalities. The founders drafted the commerce clause out of the concern that states would discriminate against one another, or pass bills in ways that passed the harmful effects of in-state actions to other states (trash dumping), or would be unable to regulate areas that spanned multiple states.

If we take that as the intuition, we may understand the phrase "commerce" to encompass areas that are especially suceptible to these interstate externalities. What is commerce, after all, but the movement of goods from point A to B. Once commodified, goods move freely, and it is pointless to say that this pair of shoes is produced for "in-state" consumption and the other is for "export" out of state. For fungible goods, at least, there is an intuition that there is a fundamental connection w/ interstate commerce.

Yet not all commerce is commerce. Consider four categories:
1. Fungible goods (commodities)
2. Unique goods (e.g. artwork)
3. Interstate services (e.g. Western Union)
4. Local services (e.g. Mama's pizza)

All four are "commercial", yet intuitively, not all four affect interstate commerce to the same degree - hence the intuition that the activity has to "substantially affect" interstate commerce. 2 & 4 seem inheriently local, to the point that it becomes questionable why the gov't has to regulate it. Yet that judgment line has been virtually obliterated thanks to the Wickard aggregation principle. Taken alone, Mama's pizza has no effect; taken "as a class", all the Mama's pizzas in the nation make a pretty big dent. Perhaps in the dough market.

So without the "substantial affect" test as a viable line, the burden shifts onto defining "commerce". Here, there is some intuition that, as an abstraction, most commerce - most exchanges in goods and services in today's internet, globalized marketplace - will have externality issues and require federal legislation.

Yet if "commerce" is only a shorthand for denoting a category that has externalities, there will inevitably be other activities - arguably non-commercial - that will nonetheless have interstate externalities and perhaps require Federal legislation. Should federal legislation touch these? Marijuana. Adoptions.

Is the solution to expand "commerce" broadly - anything that conceivably touches money? Or, as I believe, is the solution to make explicit the purpose of the commerce clause - the elimination of externalities - and regulation ONLY when those externalities are present, and to demand a stricter accountability for finding them.

Maybe it's saying the same thing as the doctrine already is. Just more honestly.

Politics: Education in China and US

2007-04-26T13:12:00.000-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6589301.stm

Interesting BBC article about how math education in China - as measured by difficulty of exam questions - outstrips anything in the UK, and by implication, in the west. Shocking that the UK college diagnostic test is testing the pythagorian theorem, i.e. what i learned in middle school.

The argument against the type of testing regime in China is that it kills creativity and creates advanced test-takers rather than people with the "creative problem solving" abilities that Western education systems are supposed to engender. Critics argue that the fact that the US still leads in technical innovation reflects the superiority of its "creativity-first" model over a more mechanized approach.

For two reasons, this argument is flawed:

1) The US creativity-first model works for only the wealthiest schools. Allowing student creativity requires a teacher-student ratio of around 20:1 or less. Any more and the "creativity" is overshadowed by the necessity of classroom management. So if the model works at all, it only does so for a small section of schools. For everyone else, this model creates a diversion from fundamental principles and an inability to hold failing schools accountable. General chaos ensues as "inspired" school teachers teach the class to build popcicle-stick bridges, without first teaching them how to do fractions.

And if you look closer, the best schools in the US don't even emphasize "creativity" that much. They emphasize honors classes, AP sciences classes, SAT prep -> all the things that are, guess what, oriented towards the fundamentals.

2) As people who've ever watched a NBA game realizes - fundamentals always win over glamor. Time after time, it's the team that blocks out and that makes free throws that wins over the team that shoots 50 3-pointers or attempts alley-oops every other possession. But there isn't actually a tension: the best teams are the ones who have the fundamentals and then build off that to create pretty-looking plays.

Same in education. If you look underneath the US creativity, you'll realize that it's been fueled by those Chinese and Indian engineers who got their fundamentals first and then learned how to improvise. They get a good solid primary and secondary education in their home countries, and then come to the West - where there is the resources - to do tertiary training. These are the people getting pH.D.'s nowadays and - increasingly - the people publishing in the top journals.

So emphasize creativity, at your risk, but don't let it be an excuse for failing test scores.

Politics: Va Tech

2007-04-22T15:01:00.000-04:00

32 + 1. = 33.

every few days, somewhere in the middle east, some young man, ranging from 16 to 30 in age, straps a bomb on his chest, in his car, in a bag, and walks into a crowd. boom.

we in america watch in the distance, mildly saddened, but tempered by distance. by the certainty that it is baghdad, kabul, jerusalem. then madrid, london, new york.

then finally it becomes irrational. finally there is no more politics. no more agenda. no more cause. just a maniacally depressed young man with two guns and a desire to end lives.

and this we don't understand.

is it fair to call Cho a martyr? no, not to us. just as suicide bombers aren't martyrs to us. but to some other alienated kid out there, someone watching the news and receiving the tapes on a different frequency, who's hearing it in the suburban american version of jihad-dom, there is the martyr's message: hedonism, vodka, sex, U.S.A.

truth is: we don't understand suicide bombers. and, after all the forensics is done, we won't understand suicide shooters. we'll just have to accept that for some, there is a sense of alienation so strong that it must be resisted against by any means necessary. this is durkeimian anomie, the fit of not fitting, a collective subculture of people who hate culture. counter-culture with guns instead of guitars.

he's silent, but he's not alone. there's others out there. and that. that is frightening.

Why I hate out-of-towners

2007-04-06T17:37:00.000-04:00

So I never stopped to think about why we New Yorkers are perceived to be rude until today:

I was riding the elevator going up from my building's basement with my basket of laundry. The elevator stops at the first floor, door opens, and a group of four upper middle-aged people step in. Three women, one man.

Door closes.

One of the women looks at me - in casual shirt and shorts - and at my basket of laundry, and says, "Columbia University student doing his laundry."

Now, I'm not sure who the comment was directed towards, and I'm really annoyed (it's a dreary day out anyways), so I retort, "Is this some kind of museum tour?"

To which she answers, "Yes, we're visiting a friend of ours who lives in this building."

Elevator keeps going up. Stops at my floor, thank god, and I get out to leave. "Good luck in college," she says. Now i'm really annoyed. "This is actually a grad school dorm," I say, and leave.

Small episode, but it shows the difference between New Yorkers and everyone else. New Yorkers, getting on an elevator, know to get in, look to the front, and shut up. Now, if there's something really noteworthy - a cute dog, a cute girl - you may have permission to invade the other person's space and start a conversation. If it's a cute dog, the person's asking for it. Same w/ cute girls. And maybe, if there's a MASSIVE rainstorm outside and the person getting in looks drenched, you are allowed to express sympathy. This is good New Yorker manners.

BUT, if there's really NOTHING to build a conversation out of, and you're in an elevator for all of 30 seconds, you shut up and just watch the dials.

What you do not do is invade other people's privacy by random observations. What you REALLY do not do is remark about other people in the elevator to the friends you came in with. We new yorkers like conversation. but we like interesting conversation. we like meaningful conversation. we do not like observations about us that state the perfectly obvious just so you don't have to listen to the sound of the elevator gears for a few seconds.

and what we really don't like is to be regarded as museum objects. Do you ever see us going to Omaha and going "Midwestern farmer riding his tractor down main street?" NO. We keep those thoughts to ourselves. Yet you tourists come, and you feel it necessary to put us into some sort observational box. "Oh look, mommy, there's a Columbia University student... with a Barnard girl... oh god, what're they doing with that cucumber ???" Just shut up and let it go. It's new york. it happens.

Law: NYC bans N-word

2007-03-01T01:28:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6406625.stm

Can I say just how STUPID I think a law banning the N-word is, even if it has no legal effect? Not only is the Constitutional question looming, this is the work of a ridiculous generational conflict between a prior generation that understood the word as a perjorative and a new generation that sees it as self-referential. Parents can tell their children not to call each other N-----; the government should not have to. The next NYC city ordinances will, if this trend is followed, be "pull up your pants," "wear hats forwards," and "do not rap using any profanity." the ability of people to change words and give them new meaning is precisely cultural evolution at its best: the N-word is being "salvaged," in a way, from its traditional meaning. And 50 year old city councilors should leave it alone.

Law: on the German cannibal

2007-02-28T17:11:00.001-05:00

It's argued that the government somehow has an interest in regulating you from activities which you otherwise consent to doing: suicide, not wearing a seatbelt, doing drugs or, having someone else chop you up and store you in a freezer. These are activities which primarily only affect your own person, and, as such, gov't regulation seems like an intrusion into personal autonomy.

Under what principle can the government do this?

One, is it because some of these activities have negative social externalities? That is, they affect other people in their indirect consequences? E.g. not wearing a seatbelt results in more serious injuries and thus more burden on the public health system.

Yet this argument fails insofar as you would then have to weigh the strength of those externalities against the individual's autonomy. For seatbelts, if the person pays for his own health insurance, perhaps the externalities are minimal. Suicide, too, may not be that bad if you had no family to get depressed over you.

Two, alternately, is it because policy makers believe that individuals have limited rationality, and do not know what is in their best interests? Certainly the German cannibalism case, or suicides in general, apply here. But so does doing drugs or not wearing seatbelts. Government here is being paternalistic, perhaps in a good way, in saying that somethings, while pleasurable in the short run, are bad in the long run. And certainly cognitive psychology shows that people are extremely bad at making the "pleasure now versus pain later" cost-benefit calculations.

Or finally, is it just because the gov't, as some sort of guardian of societal mores, finds some activities so morally reprehensible that it feels itself as having a duty to prevent them?

It seems to me a lot of the law on pornography turns on which one of these three explainations you take: Is it bad for society? Bad for the individual consumer? Or just bad in general?

Law: judicial review of legislative spending

2007-02-22T20:43:00.000-05:00

given the problem of earmarks and pork-spending, there are two solutions possible:

1. executive check.
2. judicial check.

the solution of an executive check - in the form of a line-item veto - has been tried and struck down as unconstitutional. i wonder now if there is a possibility of using a judicial check.

this might work in the same way as the non-delegation doctrine. delegation occurs when the legislature gives some law making power to an administrative agency. the court articulated a principle that the law had to have an "intelligible principle" governing it, or be ruled impermissibly vague.

we might try something like this with rider bills , which are spending items attached to unrelated items of legislation. the court might try to articulate a standard that any item that has no rational relationship to the stated purposes of the bill be struck down as impermissible.

no idea where the court might find this power... and huge separation of power constitutional issues.

Law: a tax on free speech?

2007-02-22T20:20:00.000-05:00

a thought came up as a combination of the con law and the regulation classes that i'm taking: wouldn't it be cool to replace the MPAA's movie rating system with a simple tax on movie violence and obscenity and other undesirable behavior? for instance, smoking in movies and TV encourages teens to smoke in emulation.

for the argument to work, we need to assume that negative TV messages have social externalities. that is, while they may increase a film's sales, they adversely affect public morals.

the current system, to me, has a serious incentive problem. there are four grades of films: G, PG, PG-13, and R. (we'll leave aside M). each of those four ratings has a fair amount of room for maneuver. the rules are fairly reasonable, but by only having four categories, there is inherently a problem that most movie producers will not adjust the content of the films unless the film falls close to the boundary between two ratings.

For instance, if a film uses the F-word 1-3 times, it gets a PG-13. So there is an incentive to lower the usage of the word if there's only 4 instances of it. But, if the character says it more than 3 times, then there is no incentive to cut back. the character can say it 10 times, 20 times, and still keep the same rating. (although the reviewer's discretion may jump in at a certain point).

a similar problem exists that violence usually gets a free pass, whereas sex is heavily censored. and because it goes on behind the scenes, the public doesn't have a good idea of the relative weights of these screen acts.

in contrast, a tax system to obscenity would make film makers internalize the costs of obscenity (with proceeds going to, say, PBS). a filmmaker would have to make a cost-benefit decision on whether each instance of nudity or of violence is worth - artistically speaking - the tax penalities he would have to make for it.

So a system where every instance of the F-word is taxed at (arbitrarily speaking) 0.5% of revenue, filmmakers would limit that word only to those instances where it adds to the storyline. extraneous smoking, sex, and shooting scenes would be taken out, reducing the overall amount of violence while giving the artist the maximum flexibility to preserve the storyline.

is this censorship? well, i want to draw a distinction between movies as commodity and movies as expression. no, it's not a clear line. but one can certainly argue that nowadays, movies are as much a cultural product (along the thinking of the Frankfurt School), made for mass consumption, as they are mediums for expression. to the extent that they exist to make their producers rich, there is not a strong justification to protect them absolutely. and to the extent that the tax system can deter egregious behavior, perhaps it may forestall legislative backlashes that are more restrictive, just as what was proposed in the aftermath of the columbine shootings.

Politics: Obama

2007-02-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

Biden on Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Offensive? Not to Obama. Probably to every other Black presidential candidate. But guess what, Biden is just saying what every single political observer is thinking: "Yes, Obama is black, and no, Obama is not that Black."

First, Obama is Black. Duh. He's half white, but in our one-drop culture, half is enough for Blackness unless you pull a Tiger Woods and start finding some native american in that mix.

Second, Obama is not that Black. No, not because his father's African, or because he grew up outside the US, or any of that. He's not that Black because all the usual ways of attacking a Black candidate: as outside the mainstream, as poor and inchoate and rabble-rousing, don't apply here.
Obama, in fact, is pretty invulnerable to those attacks, for one reason and one reason alone. I'll spell it: H-L-S. Obama is part of what I see as a new generation of minority leaders, many of whom are my classmates. These leaders are products of the opening of the American education system to minorities.

They've gone to top schools. They've had professional careers. Most engage in activism as a matter of personal conviction, but most also have other career objectives, other goals. Obama, for instance, was a U Chicago law professor before becoming an activist. Go ahead, pigeonhole that. It's hard to call them radicals, or rabble, or any of the things that lie behind words like "articulate and bright and clean."

So instead, they'll call him "Black, but not that Black"

Social: Law student conversations

2007-01-29T00:33:00.000-05:00

Just came back from coffee/tea with friend from USC (millenniums of cultural evolution and human beings end up socializing pretty much the same way as the ancient romans must have, minus the steamy bathhouses) and we commiserated at the lack of a non-legally-oriented social scene at our respective lawschools. he complained about how his classmates at so cal are obsessed w/ everything law; i related how every conversation i have nowadays w/ law school friends seems to live and die by "how's your job search" and "how do you like your classes". all of which made me wonder, have we become more boring? are we less interesting people?

and then, we proceeded to talk about school... and post-graduation... and our law school friends... and our professors... and more about our schools...

our lives have become a horror movie: you run and run and run but you know, soon enough, you gonna get stabbed anyways.

Movie: Rocky Balboa

2007-01-27T23:39:00.000-05:00

"Life is hard and it will knock you down, but it is not about how hard you get knocked down, its about how far you keep going forward after you get knocked down that matters."

take your hero, and beat him up before he ever gets in the ring. beat him up with a bad kid, with a dingy restaurant, with a grimy city. and beat him up some more by making him take pity in a bartending mom who more wal-mart than victoria's secret. and then kick him by making him the object of ridicule, up to the opening moments of the fight.

then watch him stand up. and stand up. and stand up.

everyone who leaves the theaters will remember that line. it's the hook to the tune, the part you're supposed to hum to yourself.

but the other part of it, the part that's in the background, is that bit outside the ring. that swath of the movie that says, this is where they put the old horses out to die. to tell their fight stories over and over again and pose with teenagers for their digi-cam parents. the part that existentially questions whether there was any real point to the fight when, at the very end of it, rocky loses and the only validation he's won is that he's remained standing for 10 rounds of beatings. the part that asks what was all that "stuff" he had to get out of himself inside the ring and why he couldn't be doing it in a shrink's chair instead of a boxing ring.

cause, make it clear, end of that fight, rocky goes back to that restaurant. with, as mason dixon's manager says, "some more stories to tell." you take every single sports movie ever told, and you stay and right before the credits, they roll up and go "...and he ended up as a successful car salesman." and you wonder, this was it? this was what you get for that last minute shot? that last touchdown? that last punch? this? an eternity reliving that moment while peddling ford tauruses to suburban soccer moms?

that's the crisis rocky the movie can't resolve. that's the parallel with his kid, the i-banker groupie that, try as he might, just can't sell as many bonds as his dad can land punches. that hates the shadow but can't figure out who he is away from it.

yes, i'm making the case that silvester stallone, mr. rambo, has made the ultimate post-modern flick. the ultimate film about what do you do with a boxer past his prime? a dog - an ugly dog - past puppy-hood? a city - all working-class philly - past its glory days and reduced to a bunch of tenements where "the bus hasn't come in years". a life without meaning, a city without meaning, mourning the past (personified in the dead wife Adrian) and needing just someone to sock your lights out.

what do you do?

you go to vegas. and hope the lights drown your sorrows.