Boston Review

Bill Ayers hosts a right-wing dinner party:

“Right wing blogs erupted, with some writers tickled by Carlson’s sense of humor and others earnestly saluting his courage and daring in service to ‘the cause’ for his willingness to sit in close quarters with us—radical leftists and enemies of the state. But others took a grimmer view: ‘Don’t do it, Tucker,’ they pled. ‘This will legitimize and humanize two of America’s greatest traitors.’

“Carlson got a congratulatory letter from the IHC that offered ten potential dates for dinner and noted that ‘all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold’ and that ‘views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.’ I imagined the exhausted scrivener bent over his table copying that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough?

“Carlson chose February 5—Super Bowl Sunday.”

[Fiction, Aura Estrada short story contest winner] A Chinese American woman meets her neighbor under unfortunate circumstances:

‘So where are you from?’ the woman asked me.

‘We just moved up here from the city.’

‘No, I mean originally.’ I knew what this question meant.

‘I was born in China but I’ve lived in New York all my life. I came here before I even turned one.’

‘Oh, China. My sister took a trip to China last year. She said it was very beautiful.’

‘I’ve never been,’ I said. ‘Since I was born, of course.’

‘But your husband, he’s not Chinese.’ Her brow was furrowed as if she was trying to recall a complicated chronology of events. I was tempted to tell her that Daryl was Chinese, just to see if she would believe me.

‘No, he’s not Chinese.’

[Fiction] A student juggles the present and the future:

“The future is messy. Scott’s senses feed him all possible futures at once. He’s learned to wander only a few seconds ahead. That’s close, but it’s still not normal. This man, though, is a relief to his senses. He makes everything clean. Scott wonders for how long he can ogle the man and if he’ll ever walk by the room again. He untethers his senses, and the future rushes in.

“Thirty seconds from now, the man, when he turns to leave, will see Scott juggling. He will rip the flyer he posted off of the bulletin board. The dorm room door will bounce against the closet wall when he knocks on it. A boom will punctuate the bounce. The man will stare at the door, chagrined. Scott finds him even more like a teddy bear from the front.”

The city’s reaction to the fire, the most lethal in 30 years, was fierce. Many residents had grown tired of these tattooed and pierced panhandlers. In the days after the fire, there were calls to enforce vagrancy laws more strictly and bulldoze the squats. Yet the conditions in the crime-infested streets of the Ninth Ward were already very rough, and that hadn’t kept anyone away. As Flea’s procession the day before the fire had demonstrated, there were a lot more of these traveling kids in town than those begging for change in the French Quarter.

On April 20, 2005, George W. Bush signed into law a bankruptcy bill that had been pending in Congress for eight years. The bill was written by credit-industry lobbyists, shopped to their friends in Congress, and supported by tens of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions. It might be dismissed as just one more piece of highly focused special-interest legislation except for the damaging vision of middle-class America that it reinforced: irresponsible people consumed by appetites for goods they don’t need, who think little of cost, and who would rather file for bankruptcy than repay their lawful debts.

In the developed world, these ideas are beginning to affect policy. For instance, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 encourages U.S. employers to establish automatic enrollment for retirement plans. Could such approaches help alleviate poverty in developing countries? If policies based on behavioral economics can help Americans save more, could they also help Indian children get vaccinated or Kenyan children get cleaner water?

One could also read ‘The Master Switch’ as a much bolder attempt to influence the future of the information economy, not just net neutrality. In the book and in recent public appearances, Wu has focused on the growing power of Apple, Facebook, and Twitter—not the usual contestants in net neutrality debates. He believes that some of these companies exhibit features of earlier information empires and may be hurting innovation. The separations principle is clearly meant to apply to them, and to the information industry as a whole, not just to network operators such as Comcast and Verizon. The merits and implications of Wu’s position, therefore, need to be assessed in a much broader context than net neutrality alone.

Many features of marriage that were once considered essential have been remade, often in the face of strong resistance, by courts and legislatures. Economic and social changes have led to increasing legal equality for the marriage partners, gender-neutrality of spousal roles, and control of marital role-definition by spouses themselves rather than by state prescription. Yet marriage itself has lasted, despite these dramatic changes. Not only that: it retains vast appeal.

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

Profits, poverty, and immigration converge