This year’s Orange Prize was won by U.S. born and New York and London resident Lionel Shriver, for her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. The Orange Prize is a literary honor, for work by women, judged by women. As the prize website explains, “The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English.”

My current understanding of the novel is that it is about a mother trying to understand why her teenage son committed a high-school massacre and how much of his behavior is her fault. One of the reasons that this particular novel stirred up a great deal of popular interest is that it has been seen as a novel against children and as promoting the idea of not having them.

I should say that I haven’t read Shriver’s novel, although I’ve read several reviews and commentaries about it, but I’m about to go out to my local bookstore and purchase a copy. I’m particularly motivated to do this right now by a lengthy piece by Shriver in today’s Observer (the Sunday edition of The Guardian), titled No kids please, we’re selfish.

The central point of Shriver’s Observer article is that it just might be that there is something selfish about the choice not to have children and that this choice is going to affect the gene pool, the ethnic makeup of our societies and perhaps the entire future of civilization. As such, it represents something of a U-turn for Shriver. As she writes

Yet even as “Kevin” won the Orange Prize in July, when my role as poster-girl for “maternal ambivalence” jacked up yet another power, something strange was starting to happen. I sometimes departed from script. When a Sunday Times reporter (who clearly thought me a chilly, arrogant creep) asked if I didn’t think that declining to reproduce was essentially “nihilistic”, I piped readily, “Of course.” And when a reporter from Birmingham asked tentatively in a phone interview, “Wasn’t refusing parenthood a little … selfish?” I bellowed into the receiver, “Absolutely!”

The truth is, I had started to feel guilty.

Her new attitude is summed up by

I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I’ve had it with being the Anti-Mom, and would like to hand the part to someone else.

The article is very well written, thought provoking in many parts and funny in some places. However, I found the article deeply annoying overall. In my opinion, there are enough examples of ill thought out and overly generalized statements to damage the piece irreparably. However, what got to me most is the unsubstantiated conflation of small, deeply personal opinions and decisions with greater societal trends in the western world. This mixing of ideas is used to portray many people who decide not to have children, including Shriver herself, as (at the risk of hyperbole) atheistic, nihilistic, narcissistic hedonists.

Before I get into Shriver’s article a little, I’d better come clean about my position on all this. My wife and I are one of those couples which, although children are not absolutely ruled out, acknowledge that we currently find our lives highly enjoyable, challenging and fulfilling, and that it is therefore likely that we will ultimately choose not to have kids. I don’t consider this to be selfish at all; or, rather, no more selfish than a couple who want kids deciding to go ahead and have them. I certainly can’t say I’ve come across people (although I guess they might exist) who knew that they didn’t want children but who made a conscious decision that, for the good of society, they’d better go ahead and have them anyway.

My problems with Shriver’s newly modified attitude on all this are best explained with a few examples. The paragraph that I find most annoying has, of course, a germ of truth in it. However, it is its inherent generalizations and its underlying pop-spiritualism that damn the enterprise

I propose that we have now experienced a second demographic transition. Rather than economics, the engine driving Europe’s “birth dearth” is existential.

To be almost ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead. As we age – oh, so reluctantly! – we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?’ We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

I really find this remarkably short sighted and misguided. The idea that our predecessors asked themselves more frequently whether they had a greater societal purpose needs a lot more backing up than I see here if I am to take it seriously. At this level it seems to me more reasonable that our predecessors were either frantically scrabbling to survive through famines, wars or natural disasters (unlike today, of course) or were mindlessly following any of a number of social superstitions (religions) that served many other less noble purposes than those ascribed to them by Shriver. In short, I’m only too glad that less people are asking “Did I serve God?”, since I think this is a needless distraction from our real, earthly problems.

I find it equally misleading to say that people nowadays give less thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation. I would say that multiculturalism has forced these issues to the fore in today’s world, in a way that they never were in the past. I realize that Shriver’s point is that individuals don’t seem to take these seriously, but I still don’t agree. Many childless-by-choice people I know have given real thought to these issues, and have made their decisions anyway. I don’t agree with Shriver that this makes them more selfish, just that they have made their peace with a different outcome than Shriver would like. It’s OK with them if the developed world becomes browner and more Spanish-speaking. If other people lived the way they do – trying to be happy, to allow others the freedom to be happy and to raise the quality of human life, not the quantity – I could live happily in that world.

As I mentioned, it is the sweeping application of personal decisions to society as a whole and the underlying spiritual fumblings that I find most annoying about this article. Here it is again:

My friends and I are decent people – or at least we treat each other well. We’re interesting. We’re fun. But writ large, we’re an economic, cultural and moral disaster.

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” that we’d both have fancied ourselves in our younger days, but standard issue for our age. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy – a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now – to take that step-aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there’s someone around to inherit the place when the party is over – has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction writers craft when imagining the end of the world.

This is the kind of silly, unsubstantiated extrapolation that leads to the kind of sentence with which she chooses to end the article

When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the west of being decadent, degenerate and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they’ve got a point.

Now, I don’t mean to completely besmirch Ms. Shriver. In this interview she comes across as intellectual, bright, witty, and, yes, very likeable. She is clearly a talented writer who thinks about and is prepared to tackle the large issues. And there are, indeed, many points in her article with which I agree wholeheartedly. For example

We encourage minorities of every stripe to be proud of their heritage – Jamaicans, Muslims, Jews – as well they should be. We don’t assume that if an immigrant from China cherishes his roots and still makes a mean moo shoo pork he is therefore bigoted toward every other ethnicity on the planet. So can Italians not champion Italianness? Or the British their Yorkshire pudding?

(particularly about the Yorkshire pudding). It’s just that I don’t really see this as something that isn’t happening. Italians seem to be fiercely proud of their culture and heritage (just ask my graduate students), and the British are just the same. In the U.S., patriotism and pride in “the American way of life” is all pervading. Americans have no excuse for not knowing what is good about their culture and society. Those who are choosing not to have kids are making an informed decision, not a careless one.

So what’s my point? Well, I and many other people I meet are making informed decisions not to have children. Yes, we are doing it because we like our lives, get great personal pleasure from them, and realize that children would change them immeasurably. But we’re not all using the extra time just to worry about being fat or to indulge in Bacchanalian orgies (although, man are those fun!). Some of us take part in volunteer work. Some of us send more of our disposable income (although I don’t like that phrase, since people with kids do choose to use their money on that when they decide to procreate) to charity. Some of us use our extra time to be involved in the community, in public science education for example.

Many of us have thought about and realize the implications of our decision for our lineage (my Dad has been sure to help me realize it), and for the ethnic and cultural makeup of society. But we’re not going to have kids just so our society can continue to be white and European. And, speaking personally, I’m not going to be swayed by any argument that invokes God as a higher reason to procreate.

I (and I think most of us who are childless-by-choice) don’t hate kids, and if you want them, I absolutely think you should have them. My friends who have children are, almost to a one, bringing up remarkable little people, who are a joy to be around, and who I think it is clear are going to be great assets to society. I happily pay huge amounts in taxes to help them and others in that choice.

Just try to keep the little ankle-snappers on a leash when I’m grocery shopping please.

Call me old-fashioned. Call me a snob. You’d probably be right on both counts. Warning: The following is a rant. A state of readiness with mouse pointer on scrollbar advised.

Well, that tears it. One of the last major (non-family-and-friends) reasons that I look forward to visiting the UK will disappear on Saturday. Really. The Guardian has given in and will shed its broadsheet format, and become a tabloid, like the other major broadsheets have done previously. Now in the case of the Times, it was appropriate, since it had long been a tabloid newspaper in all but size, and so gave in to the inevitable. But this is the Guardian we’re talking about!

The first thing I always do (when I come out of the embarrasing little stupid 10ft long shopping-mall-thing they have between customs and arrivals at Heathrow…does anyone ever buy anything there? Who?) is dash to the newsagent right across from it to get a copy of the Guardian (or the Observer if it’s a Sunday – that will soon be downsized too). It’s like meeting a loved one at the airport. (Most times, it is in fact the only loved one meeting me, so that works…)

It just won’t be the same. It is worse than just the size change (they’ve tried to soften the blow by making it slightly bigger “Berliner” size – wh-hat?) but they’re also changing the whole masthead and overall look. And it is going to be colour on every page! What are they thinking?! It’s going to be like reading a holiday brochure, or a fashion magazine, or a Marvel comic, not a newspaper. Have a look to the right, and also follow the link for the full horror, along with a lot of stories about the change, such as this one.

What is my problem with this?, you might ask. Besides the fact that it is just not going to look as elegant and minimalist as it did previously? Is that not enough?

Ok, well the other reason is this. I find that when I look at a formerly great paper like the Independent, demoted to in its tabloid form, I can’t help but perceive that the headlines have rather evolved toward the sort of writing I used to associate with….the tabloids. So rather than “Unusually Warm Weather Enjoyed Around the British Isles”, or “Margaret Thatcher Elected to High Office” you more commonly now get something approaching the old tabloid classics “Phew! What a Scorcher!”, or “Gotcha!”, no matter what the issue. Is it just me, or does anyone else find this? I just cannot be seen carrying a newspaper with stuff like that on the front page.

And to cap it all, and probably to show how totally out of touch I am, here are the quotes from that story link that they have from some of the senior staff (with charmingly and inexplicably very British-looking photos accompanying them, I’m pleased to note):

“It’s not only about reinterpreting the paper for a particular age, but making the case for what we do and saying it has validity.” Alan Rusbridger, editor

“Every single way you look at it, we are changing everything we do and how we do it.” Carolyn McCall, GNL chief executive

“If everyone else is shouting louder and louder, the only way you can be heard is by talking in a normal tone of voice – or even whispering.” Mark Porter, creative editor

Guys: I have no idea what those sentences mean! Is it just me? Could someone explain please? I often have this problem with media-speak.

I should also note that – for better or worse, we shall see – that the unique in UK press science supplement that they had which I told you about earlier will be discontinued, in favour of a daily column. Oh dear, I think I hear warning bells. Read the editor’s opinion on this here.

Anyway, could someone please buy me a copy of the last proper Guardian on Saturday and mail it to me? Please? I want to frame it. I’m serious. I might even buy you a pint. Two or three even.

It’s a sad day.

-cvj

[Update: Seems that the Guardian editors have a blog. You can read all sorts of things about their progress through the launch day there, look at pictures of them all down at the pub, and browse the new format paper electronically from this post.]

Keith Olberman discusses whether there are multiverses right here in the USA.

Remarkable, a real live news anchor actually comparing official’s words with their actions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen clip juxtaposition like that except on the “fake news” daily show.

For more of what happened when, see the timelines at Think Progress and Talking Points Memo.

Sometimes the matter of race in America is so blantantly and stupidly awful that I just have to laugh. The only other option is to cry, and I’m done doing that for now.

The Onion does a nice parody of some of the type of reporting we saw last week during the New Orleans tragedy:

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans “looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses.” “I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I’d managed to find,” said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. “Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers.” Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

Other excellent headlines from that same link:

God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again

Louisiana National Guard Offers Help By Phone From Iraq

-cvj

(Via Boing Boing)

Watching the grilling that Tony Blair has received from the British media since his decision to involve Britain in the Iraq war, one cannot help but make comparisons with the kid gloves approach of the mainstream U.S. media to the outrageous behavior of the Bush administration.

The BBC is now carrying a viewpoint article, titled Has Katrina Saved the U.S. Media? (OK, I wasn’t particularly imaginative with my title, I know), which emphasizes this point. The article suggests that the outrage seen in such unlikely places as Fox News may signal a turning point in this trend, and that the gloves may now come off in the coverage of our government’s incompetence.

One interesting part of the article is a very succinct explanation of why many people view the mainstream U.S. media with such suspicion.

Amidst the horror, American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back, thanks to Katrina.

National politics reporters and anchors here come largely from the same race and class as the people they are supposed to be holding to account.

They live in the same suburbs, go to the same parties, and they are in debt to the same huge business interests.

Giant corporations own the networks, and Washington politicians rely on them and their executives to fund their re-election campaigns across the 50 states.

It is a perfect recipe for a timid and self-censoring journalistic culture that is no match for the masterfully aggressive spin-surgeons of the Bush administration.

But last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow, from slick anchors who spend most of their time glued to desks in New York and Washington.

It’s an interesting suggestion. However, I can’t help but be cynical and expect that it won’t last, essentially for the reasons in the first few paragraphs, which I don’t expect to change. But I guess we’ll see.

The independent UK thinks Americans might have questions. In an article entitled “The questions a shocked America is asking its President”, they ask:

• Why has it taken George Bush five days to get to New Orleans?

• How could the world’s only superpower be so slow in rescuing its own people?
• Why did he cut funding for flood control and emergency management?
• Why did it take so long to send adequate National Guard forces to keep law and order?
• How can the US take Iraq, a country of 25m people, in three weeks but fail to rescue 25,000 of its own citizens from a sports arena in a big American city?

A BBC correspondent has some thoughts on that, starting with:

The only difference between the chaos of New Orleans and a Third World disaster operation, he said, was that a foreign dictator would have responded better.

Meanwhile, CNN has a new article up on “The Big disconnect on New Orleans” which compares official statements of the crisis to CNN reporting over the past couple of days.
UPDATE: Now on CNN, meterologists discussing what they were forcasting for last friday, 2-1/2 days before the Hurricane hit land. They were forcasting a Category 4 hurricane, which was widely predicted to completely flood New Orleans.

Also worth reading: Salon has up several pages of reader contributed stories from people who were in the area.

Well, here I am in China, being treated wonderfully by gracious and polite hosts and learning first hand about some of the wonderful science being done by Chinese researchers. Today, for example, I heard a very nice talk by Ping He, who described a large-scale computational project to understand the distribution of the dark baryons in the universe. It is impressive work.

To come to China to take part in this exciting exchange of ideas and approaches, I needed to obtain a Chinese visa. I did this through a company, a representative of which walks your application to the embassy and gets it processed. The entire procedure took about a week, most of which was taken up by my passport being FedExed to the company and back to me. It was, obviously, very easy.

So you can imagine how embarrassing it is to read, in The New York Times, about how hard it can be for Chinese researchers to get their visas to visit the United States. Those of us in academia have been dealing with this problem for the last three or four years, encountering long delays in getting visas for excellent graduate students, for postdocs, for faculty and for visitors to conferences.

However, this particular story is even more embarassing because it concerns Xiaoyun Wang, a Chinese mathematician, who last year

…shook up the insular world of code breakers by exposing a new vulnerability in a crucial American standard for data encryption. On Monday, she was scheduled to explain her discovery in a keynote address to an international group of researchers meeting in California.

But a stand-in had to take her place, because she was not able to enter the country. Indeed, only one of nine Chinese researchers who sought to enter the country for the conference received a visa in time to attend.

In other words, Dr. Wang’s visit was undoubtedly going to help us with national security, as well as representing the free exchange of scientific knowledge that we should expect and which provides important common ground between the two countries.

The Times continues:

The visa snag angered organizers of the annual meeting of the International Cryptology Conference, who argued that restrictions originally created to prevent the transfer of advanced technologies from the United States are now having the opposite effect.

“It’s not a question of them stealing our jobs,” said Stuart Haber, a Hewlett-Packard computer security expert who is program chairman for the meeting, Crypto 2005, being held this week in Santa Barbara. “We need to learn from them, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot.”

And we should be hopping mad about it!

Despite my earlier remarks about certain frustrating aspects of the political process in the UK, I do remain impressed with other aspects. One of them is the fact that the politicians are expected to take part in extremely penetrating live interviews, where they have no (detailed) advance warning of the subject or the questions. The other thing I like is that fact that the morning radio – in particular the Today Programme on the BBC’s Radio 4 – is the primary medium for this sort of serious political discussion, and as a member of the government, politicians in high office have to rise to the challenge of being interviewed in this format on a regular basis. And oh yes, it can be a bit of a blood sport sometimes listening to a politician’s arguments being dissected live on prime time morning radio. One of the most skilled – probably the most skilled – surgeons in this realm of journalism is John Humphrys. (Pictured above right in a photo I cheekily lifted from the BBC site, but only to point back to it.)

Today, the 8:10am interview on Today was with John Reid, the Defence Secretary, and the interviewer was John Humphrys, and the subject? Iraq, the National Assembly, and the constitution. John Reid started out by talking about the “positive” things that have been going on in Iraq as a result of the invasion and Humphrys (sometimes a bit hasty to draw blood, but in classic form) sets out at a running pace – questioning and probing relentlessly. John Reid rallies well in places, too, and so it is not all one sided. It becomes one of the most heated and passionate interviews on the subject I’ve heard for a long time, (informed with recent concerns like the London bombings, the ongoing insurgency attacks and civilian casualties, and broadened out to discuss connecting issues; and with mention and discussion of some of the statements of the late Robin Cook), since journalists seem to have forgotten how to ask hard questions about these matters over here in the USA. Come to think of it, they seldom ask the politicians anything remotely like a hard question over here (which includes putting it again and again until they get an answer).

This is just great stuff. Important stuff.

Please listen, if only to remind yourself what it really should be like: That we should have people asking hard questions about what’s going on in our name. Do listen, if only to pretend that you’re asking some of those questions. It’s as close as most of us will ever get to putting these questions directly.

This is the audio stream, and this is a direct download of an mp3, and here’s the podcast link to get the regular daily (Mon-Sat) 8:10am interview. If these links eventually die, find links to some archives, and also to the 8:10 interview link, on this page for the Today Programme.

Finally, please download or podcast it soon because the dear old BBC still are deciding to just what extent allow you access to much in the way of archives, and so I’m not sure how easy it will be to find the program after 24 hours. But do try to find it in the Today Programme’s archives if you see this late.

I hope that you find it interesting.

-cvj

I’ve been a “card-carrying member” of the ACLU for years now, although I admit that I’ve not always been diligent about paying my dues. But now I have more incentive to get that check in on time: to piss off Bill O’Reilly. Radley Balko explains, via the Poor Man.

It’s easy to join.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that another excellent radio program I love is NPR’s On The Media, that you can alos podcast, stream, or download.

Last Friday’s program was interesting and funny. Actually, it always is. The first part had an interesting discussion about terrorism, sparked off by the fact that the folks in the White House have decided to rename the “War on Terror” to “The Global War Against Violent Extremism”. [update: It's actually "The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism"; the presenters misspoke.]

The next segment was hilarious, even though in a serious and definitely non-funny context. There was an observation that there were two almost identical defiant quotations over a week apart from random unidentified Iraqi citizens about two separate insurgent attacks. So they had an interview with Mr. Unidentified Iraqi, who seemed unable to say anything else in the interview other than the identical words of the quotation again….

Then there’s excellent discussion of how the media seem to have problems reporting properly on “difficult numbers” (such as just how much is spent on international aid) on various issues, and a very intersting segment about the appalling state of journalism on health issues. (e.g. more time is given by the major TV networks to weather “news”, and training of weather news journalists than is given to health news. And this is where people get most of their health information…..)

There’s also another excellent segment about media coverage failings in important educational matters: Even though heat waves kill more people (more…)