Joshua Malbin

We’re number 5! We’re number 5!

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I saw the greatest product ever invented on The Soup and laughed for about 30 seconds straight. I love everything about it: the fact that it’s “easy to install on your dog,” comes in three separate colors, the slogan, the broken English on the FAQ page, the pixellation in the gallery’s “action shots” … everything.

Not really work-safe.

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Essex County is an ambitious effort. It reminded me a bit of Faulkner’s The Bear. (Okay, not that ambitious. What’s another example of a book that weaves family histories in separate stories set in the same place over a long period? I’m tired and my brain isn’t working right.)

The collection brings together three graphic novels all set in a fictionalized version of author Jeff Lemire’s home of Essex County, Ontario, a farming county whose inhabitants only ever seem to make it to the city if they play pro hockey. Each of the graphic novels is centered on a separate family, but as the stories unfold it becomes clear that the families are all related–albeit in ways often unknown to at least some of the family members.

Yet their tragedies are the same even when they don’t know each other. These are all stories of men whose children grow up without them, men who spend their whole lives lonely because they are cut off from the families they should have. The last of the three is putatively about a woman, but most of what she does is try to force resolutions in all the male-dominated stories around her. I don’t mean this as a feminist critique of the work; graphic novels have less space to develop their themes than other kinds of fiction, and I think it works beautifully to have all the stories echo each other in this way.

The art reminds me a little bit of fellow Canadian Chester Brown but with heavier, unrulier lines. Like Chet Brown crossed with a German Expressionist woodcut. Everything looks very sad and empty. I was particularly impressed with the way Lemire managed not only to create instantly recognizable characters with relatively few lines and simple outlines, but fairly subtle family resemblances.

Partial preview below the fold. Much fuller preview here.

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I’m editing a story right now and could use more ideas for one section of it. So here’s the question: if you had all of Manhattan all to yourself, with everything still working, what would you do?

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In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki argues that one of the obstacles to public acceptance of health-care reform is a bias in favor of the status quo:

But the public’s skittishness about overhauling the system also reflects something else: the deep-seated psychological biases that make people resistant to change. Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called “endowment effect”: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it.

And then later:

Compounding the endowment effect is what economists dub the “status quo bias.” Myriad studies have shown that, even if you set ownership aside, most people are inclined to keep things as they are: when it comes to things like 401(k)s, for instance, people tend to adopt whatever their company’s default option is, and with things like asset allocation or insurance plans people tend to stick with whatever they start with. Just designating an option as the status quo makes people rate it more highly. Some of this may be the result of simple inertia, but our hesitancy to change is also driven by our aversion to loss.

I believe it. But I think Surowiecki overlooks several critical elements of what’s going on right now.

First, people aren’t being asked to give up what they have now in favor of a defined Public Health Reform Policy X. They’re being asked to contemplate giving up what they have now in favor of a pig in a poke. There are four versions of health reform already in Congress with a fifth yet to be written, and while the four in existence are broadly similar, who the hell knows what will come out of the Senate Finance Committee or what the final bill will look like? It could be anything from a strong public-option plan to one that offers mandates without price protections.

Of course Democrats knew that this was a risk, which was why most of them wanted to have draft bills on the table before they left for August vacation. But even if they’d accomplished that much, they’d still have faced a second unacknowledged problem: nearly all the versions of health reform currently under serious consideration go farther than the plan Obama campaigned on.

It was Clinton and Edwards, not Obama, who offered plans with universal coverage mandates like the ones in all the bills that have been written. Obama only proposed to mandate coverage for all children and attacked the Clinton/Edwards universal mandate idea, a line of attack Paul Krugman warned against in this now eerily-prescient column. It was Clinton and Edwards, not Obama, who offered a strong public insurance option. Obama’s plan included something called an “exchange” (from the Roll Call link above):

Obama’s system, called the National Health Insurance Exchange, would point consumers to a plan that best suits them. It would “act as a watchdog and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more affordable and accessible,” according to Obama’s campaign Web site.

Personally, I never understood how that was supposed to work.

Finally, the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic agenda during the campaign was never health care at all. It was a tax cut. He already enacted that cut as part of the stimulus bill, though no one seems to be aware of it so he’s getting no credit for it.

So, to review: on top of status quo bias we have an undefined alternative, the fact that that alternative will nearly certainly not be what people voted for, and the fact that most people don’t know that the main domestic policy priority they thought they were voting for has already been accomplished.

I’m glad things have moved in the direction they have. When it came down to Clinton and Obama I voted for Obama, but nearly entirely because of Iraq. I recognized that Clinton’s health care proposals were better, and I think it’s great that Congress is moving much closer to her ideas. I also don’t have any amazing insights about how things should have been done better or could be done better in the months to come.

I guess I’m just getting a little bit tired of the howls of betrayal coming from certain quarters. There is no question that President Obama has so far failed to deliver on some of his campaign promises (notably, to undo Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and to do something meaningful about our history of torture). But on health care Democrats have the chance to enact a better policy than we actually voted for.

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I’m still watching it. Yes, I’m aware it’s been no good for about the past two-and-a-half, three seasons. I’ve only finally managed to put my finger on why it’s gotten so disappointing, though. If you care, I’ll share.

The original Weeds was a sharp satire of upper-class suburbia: everyone is miserable, thieving, and desperate, and Nancy is forced to sell drugs to keep up her family’s lifestyle. But a few seasons in Nancy starts to get ambitious, tries to become a drug kingpin in her own right, and keeps falling down. Ultimately she ends up in a place where Andy can tell her, as he did this week, that she hasn’t sacrificed for her family, she has sacrificed her family, and she’s only done so because she’s so desperately afraid of being ordinary.

Now, this is definitely true, and it was satisfying to see Nancy finally held accountable for her years of bad behavior. But we’re still stuck watching the ridiculous, neverending plot arc with the Mexican drug lord/mayor of Tijuana. It would have been so much better if we could have seen Weeds take on, say, the foreclosure crisis.

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David N. Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor, offered some blunt advice on Monday to David A. Paterson, New York State’s first black governor: Don’t accuse your critics of racism.

Mr. Dinkins was reacting to comments Mr. Paterson made in a radio interview on Friday that he was the victim of a racially motivated news media campaign to keep him from running for election next year.

At first I thought this article was your standard example of “whenever one black person says something about another black person, it’s news.” But no:

Mr. Dinkins, who has been close to the Paterson family for decades, took issue with the governor’s comments.

The Obama administration is also displeased:

On Friday, Patrick Gaspard, President Obama’s political director, telephoned the governor’s secretary, Larry S. Schwartz, to express displeasure at the remarks…

In fact, yesterday the president’s spokesman had to distance himself from Paterson publicly. The basic problem, as Dinkins put it, is that “Right or wrong, it’s a fight you sure can’t win.”

I’m sure David Paterson has his pride. He’s accomplished a great deal in his life (careerwise, at least), and it has to hurt to see everyone turn against him for things he obviously believes aren’t his fault. But whining about Frederick U. Dicker’s regular bashing of him in the New York Post isn’t going to help. What did he expect from the Post? Fair treatment?

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Please God, no. Please, please God. No.

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This is steaming me:

But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into “sickening” perpetrators? I’m not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of “revenge” for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino’s new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that “again” will happen.

As far as “what Jews have being doing since World War II ended” and “the possibility that ‘again’ will happen”, I don’t think anyone’s put it better than Jenji Kohan’s Weeds:

It’s also worth pointing out that the Basterds’ gory vengeance–goods delivered, makeup and prosthetics people–takes up only slightly more time in the film than it does in the trailer. The story belongs to Shoshana Dreyfus and Hans Landa, the hunted and the hunter. The Basterds, amusingly, aren’t even particularly central to the film. In fact, (spoilers after the jump)…

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I don’t think I’m going to wait to synthesize my thoughts on Inglourious Basterds into one review-like piece.  Lucky me, I don’t have anything else to write about. Forthwith, the trickle, to stop when the well runs dry or Big Josh calls the plumber. I’ll try to keep spoilers after the jump.

Impressively, IB features dialogue in multiple languages, instead of what Matthew Yglesias called “Hollywood’s more conventional ‘Nazis speaking to each other in German-accented English.’” Main characters speak English, French, and German; Nazi officer Hans Landa rotates effortlessly between all three and even dips into Italian in one scene.

The first “chapter” of the movie is one long scene, close to twenty minutes, almost entirely given over to conversation. Landa visits the home of a French farmer; his purpose, which he presents as mere formality, is to make sure that his predecessor didn’t overlook any details pertaining to the Jews who used to live in the district.

For the first three pages (in the draft hosted at cineobscure, the scene runs 17 pp; I’ll use the screenwriter shorthand of 1 page=1 minute of screentime), Landa converses in French, subtitled. Then abruptly, he says:

In the audience I sat in, we all laughed. No one wants to see a whole subtitled movie, so make use of a clunky pretext and be more “inclusive” to the audience.

However… (ahead there be spoilers)

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