Delanceyplace.com 02/27/07-Mitchell Wolfson

In today's excerpt, Mitchell Wolfson, Sr., successful businessman, leader in the Jewish community, and former mayor of Miami Beach, writes to his three children in 1943 on the eve of his departure for armed service in World War II. His son, Mitchell, Jr., later both carried forward his legacy in business and founded of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach in Florida, and Nervi, Italy:

"I am addressing this letter to you, my dear children, because if something should happen to me, I want to leave a message for you, which I hope you will carry in your heart and in your conscience all your lives. ...

"I was very happy and proud to be granted the opportunity to serve our country. All of us should thank God each night that we have a country to serve. I only hope and pray that all of you will have the same opportunities and privileges that your mother, I, and all free Americans have had for so many years.

"My supreme sacrifice, if it should be, is to set an example for you, so that you may always prove worthy of your obligations and duties, and it will not be in vain, if you make yourselves a credit to our people, as I have always tried to do.

"We have always conducted our business in an ethical manner with the thought uppermost in my mind that 'He profits most who serves best.' Also, we have never invested in or leased any real estate of ours to liquor establishments, or pawn brokers. Grandfather Wolfson established this custom. I continued it, and I hope you will. I have no objections to people who care to engage in this business, but I do not believe the profits from this business could ever morally justify your engaging directly or indirectly in this type of business.

"Be fair to your employees, associates and to the public. Insist on what is just and right for yourselves, but also grant the same justice to others.

Michele Oka Doner and Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden, Feierabend, 2005, p. 120.

Delanceyplace.com 02/28/07-Buddha's Innovation

In today's excerpt, after practicing the asceticism of the holy men of his time, and reflecting on a formative "Nirvana" moment he had years before under a rose-apple tree, Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha, rejects pure asceticism for a middle way:

"Since he had left home six years before, Gotama had been fighting his human nature and crushing its every impulse. He had come to distrust any kind of pleasure. But, he now asked himself, why should he be afraid of the type of joy he had experienced on that long-ago afternoon? That pure delight had had nothing to do with greedy craving or sensual desire. Some joyful experiences could actually lead to an abandonment of egotism and to the achievement of an exalted yogic state. ...

"He had, of course, already been behaving along these lines by observing the 'five prohibition's which had forbidden such 'unhelpful' (akusala) activities as violence, lying, stealing, intoxication and sex. But now, he realized, this was not enough. He must cultivate the positive attitudes that were the opposite of these five restraints. Later, he would say that a person seeking enlightenment must be 'energetic, resolute and persevering' in pursuing those 'helpful,' '“wholesome' or 'skillful' (kusala) states that would promote spiritual health. Ahimsa (harmlessness) could only take one part of the way; instead of simply avoiding violence, an aspirant must behave gently and kindly to everything and everyone; he must cultivate thoughts of loving-kindness to counter any incipient feelings of ill will. It was very important not to tell lies, but it was also crucial to engage in 'right talk' and make sure that whatever you said was worth saying: 'reasoned, accurate, clear and beneficial.' Besides refraining from stealing, a bhikkhu should positively rejoice in taking whatever alms he was given, expressing no personal preference, and should take delight in possessing the bare minimum. The yogins had always maintained that avoiding the five prohibitions would lead to 'infinite happiness,' but by deliberately cultivating these positive states of mind, such exstasis could surely be redoubled. Once this 'skillful' behavior became so habitual that it was second nature, the aspirant, Gotama believed, would 'feel within himself a pure joy,' similar to if not identical with the bliss that he had felt as a boy under the rose-apple tree. ...

"Gotama was developing what he called a 'Middle Way' which shunned physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as destructive) on the other.

Karen Armstrong, Buddha, Penguin, 2001, pp. 69-71.

Delanceyplace.com 02/28/07-Buddha's Innovation

In today's excerpt, after practicing the asceticism of the holy men of his time, and reflecting on a formative "Nirvana" moment he had years before under a rose-apple tree, Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha, rejects pure asceticism for a middle way:

"Since he had left home six years before, Gotama had been fighting his human nature and crushing its every impulse. He had come to distrust any kind of pleasure. But, he now asked himself, why should he be afraid of the type of joy he had experienced on that long-ago afternoon? That pure delight had had nothing to do with greedy craving or sensual desire. Some joyful experiences could actually lead to an abandonment of egotism and to the achievement of an exalted yogic state. ...

"He had, of course, already been behaving along these lines by observing the 'five prohibition's which had forbidden such 'unhelpful' (akusala) activities as violence, lying, stealing, intoxication and sex. But now, he realized, this was not enough. He must cultivate the positive attitudes that were the opposite of these five restraints. Later, he would say that a person seeking enlightenment must be 'energetic, resolute and persevering' in pursuing those 'helpful,' '“wholesome' or 'skillful' (kusala) states that would promote spiritual health. Ahimsa (harmlessness) could only take one part of the way; instead of simply avoiding violence, an aspirant must behave gently and kindly to everything and everyone; he must cultivate thoughts of loving-kindness to counter any incipient feelings of ill will. It was very important not to tell lies, but it was also crucial to engage in 'right talk' and make sure that whatever you said was worth saying: 'reasoned, accurate, clear and beneficial.' Besides refraining from stealing, a bhikkhu should positively rejoice in taking whatever alms he was given, expressing no personal preference, and should take delight in possessing the bare minimum. The yogins had always maintained that avoiding the five prohibitions would lead to 'infinite happiness,' but by deliberately cultivating these positive states of mind, such exstasis could surely be redoubled. Once this 'skillful' behavior became so habitual that it was second nature, the aspirant, Gotama believed, would 'feel within himself a pure joy,' similar to if not identical with the bliss that he had felt as a boy under the rose-apple tree. ...

"Gotama was developing what he called a 'Middle Way' which shunned physical and emotional self-indulgence on the one hand, and extreme asceticism (which could be just as destructive) on the other.

Karen Armstrong, Buddha, Penguin, 2001, pp. 69-71.

Delanceyplace.com 02/27/07-Mitchell Wolfson

In today's excerpt, Mitchell Wolfson, Sr., successful businessman, leader in the Jewish community, and former mayor of Miami Beach, writes to his three children in 1943 on the eve of his departure for armed service in World War II. His son, Mitchell, Jr., later both carried forward his legacy in business and founded of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach in Florida, and Nervi, Italy:

"I am addressing this letter to you, my dear children, because if something should happen to me, I want to leave a message for you, which I hope you will carry in your heart and in your conscience all your lives. ...

"I was very happy and proud to be granted the opportunity to serve our country. All of us should thank God each night that we have a country to serve. I only hope and pray that all of you will have the same opportunities and privileges that your mother, I, and all free Americans have had for so many years.

"My supreme sacrifice, if it should be, is to set an example for you, so that you may always prove worthy of your obligations and duties, and it will not be in vain, if you make yourselves a credit to our people, as I have always tried to do.

"We have always conducted our business in an ethical manner with the thought uppermost in my mind that 'He profits most who serves best.' Also, we have never invested in or leased any real estate of ours to liquor establishments, or pawn brokers. Grandfather Wolfson established this custom. I continued it, and I hope you will. I have no objections to people who care to engage in this business, but I do not believe the profits from this business could ever morally justify your engaging directly or indirectly in this type of business.

"Be fair to your employees, associates and to the public. Insist on what is just and right for yourselves, but also grant the same justice to others.

Michele Oka Doner and Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden, Feierabend, 2005, p. 120.

Delanceyplace.com 02/26/07-One-up and One-down

In today's excerpt, Terence Real, Harvard researcher and clinical psychotherapist, speaks to the tendency prevalent among men to relate to others from a position of subordination or superiority, rather than openly as equals. His book examines the adverse effect of this tendency on relationships with partners and self. He argues that this inability both leads to forms of depression and serves as a mechanism for coping with this depression. In this excerpt, he shows the cultural prevalence of this archetype:

"The pattern in males of moving from the helpless, depressed, 'one-down' position to a transfigured, grandiose, 'one-up' position has become one of the most powerful and ubiquitous narratives in modern times. The hero, a meek, quiet, strong man of principle, is bullied and pressed to the wall. He is humiliated and abused, often physically. Then comes the turnaround. Clark Kent rips off his business suit to become Superman; David Banner transforms when angered into the Incredible Hulk. The 'weakling' stands up. In a recurring scene that lies at the heart of the film Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro stares into a mirror and challenges an imagined enemy. 'Are you looking at me?' he threatens. 'Are you looking at me?' ...

"This theme of male transformation harkens back to our archetypal heroes, like Odysseus, Orpheus, Siddhartha ... Throughout most cultures and in most ages, this mutation from a state of helplessness to sublimity has been effected by a spiritual awakening. In modern Western mythology, the same transformation is most often effected through the forces of rage and revenge. In the film Falling Down, Michael Douglas, a repressed, buttoned-down nerd, fulfills our own dark fantasies by decompensating in the middle of a traffic jam and going on a bloody rampage. All of the popular Rambo movies follow this pattern of ritual wounding followed by grand revenge. ... In The Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood is savagely beaten and crawls out of town, only to return and kill his abuser. ...

"These scenes of ceremonial injury hark back to the crucifixion and dismemberment of Dionysius, Mithras, Jesus, and other heroes of the great mystery cults. But for the spiritually rich heroes of antiquity, it is their egos, their ordinary selves, that are rent in order to give way to the sublime. In our modern version, the hero's self is not transmuted by spirit but inflated by violence. This is a dangerous direction for heroism to take. ...

"In covert depression, [a] defense or addiction [used to cope with the depression] always pulls the man from 'less than' to 'better than'--rather than to a moderate sense of inherent value."

Terence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It, Scribner, 1997, pp. 63-9.

Delanceyplace.com 02/21/07-Bureaucrats

In today's excerpt, on the heels of the Industrial Revolution comes the proliferation of bureaucrats:

"In 1891 total government personnel amounted to less than 2 percent of the total labor force in Britain. ... By the 1920s public employment exceeded 5 per cent of the workforce in Italy, 6 per cent in Britain and 8 per cent in Germany:

"In his monumental Economy and Society Max Weber portrayed the modern bureaucracy as admirably rational: 'rules, means, ends, and matter-of-factness dominate its bearing.' Yet even as he wrote, disillusionment with bureaucracy was growing, not least in the wake of the enormous expansion of the public sector during the years of war and inflation, a phenomenon more closely associated with proliferating red-tape and corruption than with rationality. The reality of modern bureaucracy turned out to be closer to Kafka's Castle, in which enigmatic files are trundled up and down grey corridors, being allocated apparently at random to faceless pen-pushers behind identical doors. ... During a violent political riot in Vienna in 1927, Elias Canetti vividly recollected seeing a distraught official outside the burning Palace of Justice, 'flailing his arms and moaning over and over again':

" 'The files are burning! All the files.'

" 'Better files than people!' I told him, but that did not interest him; all he could think of was the files. ... He was inconsolable. I found him comical, even in this situation. But I was also annoyed. 'They've been shooting down people!' I said angrily, 'and you're carrying on about the files!' He looked at me as if I weren't there and wailed repeatedly: 'The files are burning! All the files!'

"The files had become an end in themselves."

Niall Ferguson, Cash Nexus, Basic, 2001, pp. 90-91.

Delanceyplace.com 02/22/07-Bach and Beethoven

In today's encore excerpt, even artists who are esteemed in their time are often not fully appreciated or understood in that time:

"Bach's great Mass in B Minor was never performed during his lifetime: as a Catholic Mass, it could not be played in a Protestant church, and the use of an orchestra was forbidden in Catholic churches during Bach's lifetime, although he hoped it might eventually be possible. His 'Goldberg' variations is the most successful of all his works in concert performance today, yet the kind of concert in which it can be performed did not exist for another century, and it had to wait for recognition and acclaim for still another hundred years. ... The first great set of works to become the staple of serious public piano performances was the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas: only two of these were played in a concert hall in Vienna during Beethoven's lifetime. ... [A]s the musical system changes over the centuries, possibilities of exploiting the musical language suggest themselves that are too fascinating to ignore, but the works inspired by this stimulus may possibly have to wait a long time for their exploitation..."

Charles Rosen, from his review of The Oxford History of Western Music, by Richard Taruskin, The New York Review of Books, February 23, 2006, p. 43.

Delanceyplace.com 02/16/07-The Hook

In today's excerpt, New York introduces the hook:

"By the [1890s] the major venue [in the Bowery] was Miner's theater, home to such nascent legends as the young dialect comedy duo Weber and Fields and the Four Cohans, from which young George M. eventually graduated. ...

"What made Miner's absolutely unique for a time, however, was Amateur Night, held on alternate Fridays. ... A 1905 account outlines a typical night's fare: a juggler, buck-and-wing dancers, a blackface comedian in a red plaid suit, a clay modeler (incredibly, arts-and-crafts demonstrations carried off with a certain amount of panache and speed went over with the roughest crowds), a quartet of singing newsboys. As entertaining as the acts on stage might be, people often came to amateur nights at Miner's to take in the audience reaction, which could be brutal. ...

"Since the procession of semi-talented and untalented hopefuls could be painful, not to mention boring, an enterprising stage manager at Miner's came up with a way of policing the lengths of unsuccessful acts: the hook. The first one, apparently, was a stage-prop shepherd's crook lashed to a pole. Before long, hooks were being manufactured. The hook appeared in theaters all over the world, entered the language ... Back at Miner's, 'Give 'im the hook' took barely twenty-four hours to establish itself as the crowd's favorite line. Soon it was a cliche, and stage managers were kept busy hatching entertaining alternatives: dousing performers with selzer from spray bottles, carrying them out on stretchers manned by burly stage hands."

Luc Sante, Low Life, Vintage, 1991, pp. 92-93.

Delanceyplace.com 02/20/07-Mindsight

In today's excerpt, the ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else's mind-- what neuroscientists call mindsight:

"Consider the following well-established tests used in experiments on mindsight to chart a child's progress:

"* At about eighteen months, place a large mark on a baby's forehead, then have her look in a mirror. Typically those younger than eighteen months will touch the mark on the image in the mirror; those older will touch their own forehead. The younger babies have not yet learned to recognize themselves. Social awareness requires that we have a sense of self, distinguishing us from others.

"* Offer a child around eighteen months old two different snacks, such as crackers or apple slices. Watch which one the child prefers. Let the child observe you taste each of the snacks, as you exhibit clear disgust at the child's choice and show a strong preference for the opposite choice. Then place the child's hand between the two snacks and ask, 'Can you give me one?' Children younger than eighteen months will generally offer the snack they liked; older ones will offer the snack you preferred.

"* For three- and four-year-olds, hide a treat somewhere in a room while this child and an older child watch. Have the older child leave the room. Then make sure the younger child sees you move the treat to a new hiding place. Ask the younger child where the older child will look for the treat when he comes back into the room. Four-year-olds will usually say he will look in the original hiding place; three-year-olds will guess the new place. Four-year-olds have realized that someone else's understanding can be different than their own, a lesson the younger ones have not yet grasped.

"* The last experiment involves three- and four-year-olds and a hand puppet called Mean Monkey. You show children successively several pairs of stickers, and for each pair Mean Monkey asks which sticker the child wants. On every round Mean Monkey chooses for himself the child's preferred sticker, leaving the other for the child. (That's why he's called Mean Monkey.) By around age four, children 'get' Mean Monkey's game and quickly learn to tell him the opposite of what they really want--and so end up with their desired sticker. Younger children typically don't understand the puppet's mean intention and so innocently continue telling the truth, never getting the sticker they want. ...

"As growing children master these social lessons ... their empathy approaches that of an adult. With this maturity, part of innocence ends."

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, Bantam, 2006, pp. 135-6.

Delanceyplace.com 02/15/07-Flappers!

In today's encore excerpt, the 1920s and the new moral dilemma of flappers:

"In late 1924 the husband-and-wife sociologist team of Robert and Helen Lynd embarked for Muncie, Indiana, where they began a year-long study of a 'typical' American city. What they found could easily describe the typical American suburb in 2006. Teenagers were in the thrall of fashion and celebrity. Young girls fought with their mothers over the length of their skirts and the amount of make-up applied to their faces. Boys argued with their fathers over the use of the family car. ...

"A news item dated August 1923 brilliantly captured the tensions that the country's new consumer dogma could inspire. 'This little city of Somerset (Pennsylvania) has been somersaulted into a style class war,' reported The New York Times, 'with the bobbed hair, lip-stick flappers arrayed on one side and their sisters of long tresses and silkless stockings on the other.' When the local high school PTA convened to endorse a new dress code that would bar silk stockings, short skirts, bobbed hair, and sleeveless dresses, the flapper contingent defiantly broke into the meeting and chanted:

I can show my shoulders,

I can show my knees,

I'm a free-born American

I can show what I please. ...

" 'She disports herself flagrantly in the public eye, and there is no keeping her out of grown-up company or conversation.' "

Review of Joshua Zeitz's Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, American Heritage, March 2006, pp. 15-16.

Delanceyplace.com 02/14/07-A Valentine's Day Symposium

In today's excerpt, Plato writes a dialogue on a symposium, a private banquet, where each guest is asked to give a speech in honor of the god Eros. The guests in this dialogue include Phaedrus, the doctor Eryximachus, the playwright Aristophanes, the poet Agathon, and Socrates:

"Aristophanes [retells the] celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four- legged creatures provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other. ... It explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search of the one who makes us whole. '[W]here happiness for the human race lies,' Aristophanes concludes, is 'the successful pursuit of love.' Eros is the great benefactor who will '[return] us to our original condition, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy.'

"Socrates maintains that Eros is ... a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of [his mother] Poverty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and [his father] the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. ... [They produce] a son who is neither 'mortal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Constantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising and determined.' Having inherited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the presence of Aphrodite."

Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006, pp. 33-34.

Delanceyplace.com 02/14/07-Literate and Nonliterate

In today's excerpt, literate and nonliterate cultures:

"Scholars sometimes speak of 'nonliterate' civilizations--the Inca in South America or such West African states as the Ashanti of the seventeenth century or the Dahomey of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But on close inspection, such societies seem always to have some good information technology. They may not be able to record their poems, but they can handle more vital data, such as numbers, just fine.

"The Dahomey, for example, took a census to aid taxation and military mobilization. Their database consisted of a room full of boxes containing pebbles that signified the number of men and women, boys and girls, in each village. Updating was continuous, via the registering of every birth and death (including the cause of death) throughout the land. For similar purposes, the Inca used the quipu, the variously knotted and colored strings that only specialists understood. ...

"That the benefit of ancient writing may have clustered near the top of the social pyramid shouldn't surprise us. ... The fewer the gatekeepers, the more power they had. Ancient Mesopotamia had an estimated literacy rate of less than 1 percent. It's hard to say whether this reflected an attempt by the elites to monopolize the technology, but in any event scribes were a small and esteemed class, complete with an official deity (aptly, the goddess of fertility). Entry to the class--via lengthy instruction at the 'tablet house'--was granted mainly to the privileged. A Sumerian text describes a rich man giving his son's writing teacher food, a robe, and a ring to ensure a passing grade in spite of his son's indiscipline.

"Many scribes were mere transcribers and didn't themselves call the shots. Still, they seem to have reveled in the power emanating from their art. Some Egyptian scribes opined that the lower classes, lacking in brains, had to be driven like cattle. Actually, what the lower classes lacked was their own personal scribe."

Robert Wright, Nonzero, Vintage, 2000, pp. 102-104.

Delanceyplace.com 2/12/07-Bond Villains

In today's excerpt, the attraction of Ian Fleming's
larger-than-life villains in his James Bond novels:

"In the hierarchy of reasons for Bond's endurance his villains perhaps stand highest. It is quite hard to find fully comparable figures in earlier fiction, not least of course because plans for genuine global domination become feasible only in the wake of Hiroshima. An entirely new level of apocalyptic imagination becomes available to all sorts of writers and Fleming, along with Tolkien perhaps, makes best use of it.

"Mr. Big in Live and Let Die, the second Bond
novel, is the prototype for all others. ... He is the
first to give one of those self-exculpating speeches which have so often been enjoyed and burlesqued ever since: 'Mr. Bond, I suffer from boredom. I am prey to what the early Christians called 'accidie,' the deadly lethargy that envelops those who are sated ...' Or even better: 'Each day, Mr. Bond, I try and set myself still higher standards of subtlety and technical polish so that each of my proceedings may be a work of art, bearing my signature as clearly as the creations of, let us say, Benvenuto Cellini.' ...

"This sense of tremendously clever men, caged in by the dreariness of the diurnal, planning vast and
devastating schemes more for their own pleasure
than any rational gains ... is enough, in my view, to
justify Fleming's literary career.

"After a while, it becomes clear that Fleming is far
more besotted with villains than with Bond: the
impossibly ruthless Emilio Largo, dabbing his forehead with his Charvet handkerchief soaked 'with the musky scent of Schiaparelli's Snuff;' Rosa Klebb in her blood-smattered smock rushing down the corridors of SMERSH so as not to be late for a torture session; Blofeld in his castle of suicide in You Only Live Twice. ... Who would not want Dr. No's
Caribbean lair, Blofeld's Alpine fastness, Goldfinger's Kentucky stud? Even as we are picking our noses or clipping our toenails there is a piece of us saying, 'Mr. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine
heaviness."

Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, pp. 83-85.

Delanceyplace.com 02/09/07-Jews and the Plague

In today's excerpt, Jews are blamed for the plague, the Black Death that killed between a third and two-thirds of Europe's population from 1347 to 1351 and over 75 million people worldwide. They were charged with spreading the plague by poisoning wells, and pogroms were unleashed against them from the Mediterranean through Northern Europe:

"The disturbing facts of the treatment of Jews during the Black Death remains. ... Between May 17 and 19, [1348,] there had been anti-Jewish riots in six ... Spanish cities. ... Secular rulers in various regions began to allow themselves to be swept along by the tide of anti-Jewish feelings. ... Between July and August, pogroms spread throughout the country and Jews were thrown into wells they had purportedly poisoned. ...

"By December the murders began to take on increasingly macabre and outlandish characteristics. More and more Jews took their own lives rather than wait for their killers. At Esslingen in December they shut themselves in their synagogue and committed mass suicide by firing the building. ...

"Heinrich Portner [the Augsburg burghermeister] was heavily in debt to Jewish bankers and repeatedly opened the gates to 'Jew killers,' thus setting a pattern by which the rich and powerful acquiesced to the murders as a means of eliminating debts. ...

"In Strasbourg on St. Valentine's Day, a Saturday, the Jews were burned. According to a contemporary chronicler, 'They were led to their own cemetery into a house prepared for their burning and on the way they were stripped almost naked by the crowd which ripped off their clothes and found much money that had been concealed.' "

Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague, Harper, 2001, pp. 152-157.

Delanceyplace.com 02/08/07-Alan Turing

In today's encore excerpt, British genius Alan Turing invents the modern computer and later is convicted for his homosexuality:

"Typically for Turing, work on his computable numbers was completely original rather than a derivative of someone else's groundbreaking result. In fact, it was so original that ... American logician Alonzo Church ... invited him to come to Princeton University to study with him. ...

"After (World War II), von Neumann (at Princeton) and Turing each worked on projects to develop the first real computer. They each envisioned a computer containing stored instructions. But that is where the similarity ended. Von Neumann had intended that the instructions stored in the computer could not be modified. ... Turing went much further. He suggested that computers store a set of instruction tables that could be called as desired with the desired inputs. ...

"In 1952 ... the authorities charged him with the crime of 'Gross Indecency' (homosexuality). ... Following his conviction, Turing chose to submit himself to estrogen therapy rather than a two-year prison sentence. ... The estrogen therapy led to impotence (as intended) and severe depression.

"Turing committed suicide in 1954."

Stephen Hawking, God Created the Integers, Running Press, 2005, 1123-1126.

Delanceyplace.com 02/07/07-An Isolated President

In today's excerpt, the remote management style of Richard Nixon (1913-1994):

"Nixon fashioned an ingenious device to enhance his own personal authority. Where Lyndon Johnson had worked to the blare of news broadcasts from three televisions mounted on the walls of the Oval Office and to the constant clatter of two wire-service teleprinters behind his desk, Nixon preferred to have his news closely sifted and filtered. He arranged for a daily summary of stories from the newspapers and the networks to be compiled overnight in the West Wing by trusted political aides for him to check out when he came to work in the morning. Not only were the summaries tailored to his tastes and political needs, but the president could use them as a launchpad for instructions to his aides that often took the form of angry outbursts against enemies, real or imagined, inside and outside the administration. 'FIRE HIM,' he would scrawl when learning of some bureaucratic outrage. These written orders minimized his exposure to subordinates outside the powerful threesome [Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Kissinger]. Somehow, amid the intense and even frenzied interaction of scores of West Wingers, the president of the United States remained a loner, seated in an Oval Office as hushed and solemn as a hermitage. ...

"Within the executive branch, Nixon was almost as distant from his own cabinet. He utterly lacked any wish to work with his party in Congress or with his department heads as a team. 'I must build a wall around me,' he had told Haldeman on the very first evening of his presidency. ...

"One of the most poignant moments of Nixon's final departure from the White House was when he apologized to his staff for not having been in better touch with them. 'I just haven't had the time.' he said."

James MacGregor Burns, Running Alone, Basic Books, 2006, pp. 98, 105.

Delanceyplace.com 02/06/07-Domesticated Animals

In today's excerpt, only fourteen of the world's 148 species of big mammals have ever been domesticated, even though domesticated animals have been crucial to the societies possessing them and despite repeated attempts to domesticate other species:

"If one defines 'big' as 'weighing over 100 pounds,' then only 14 such species were domesticated before the twentieth century. Of those Ancient 14, 9 became important livestock for people in only limited areas of the globe: the Arabian camel, Bactrian camel, llama/alpaca, donkey, reindeer, water buffalo, yak, banteng, and gaur. Only 5 species became important around the world. Those Major Five of mammal domestication are the cow, sheep, goat, pig, and horse. ...

"Why did the other 134 species fail [to be domesticated]? ... To be domesticated, a candidate wild species must possess [five] characteristics. ...

"Diet. ... If you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn. ... As a result of this fundamental inefficiency, no mammalian carnivore has ever been domesticated for food. ... Growth Rate. To be worth keeping, domesticates must also grow quickly. ... Problems of Captive Breeding. ... Some potentially valuable animal species don't like to have ... sex under the watchful eyes of others. ... Nasty Disposition. ... Some large animals have much nastier dispositions and are more incurably dangerous than are others. Social Structure. ... Domesticated large mammals ... share three social characteristics: they live in herds; they maintain a well-developed dominance hierarchy among herd members; and the herds occupy overlapping home ranges rather than mutually exclusive territories."

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Norton, 1997, pp. 157-172.

Delanceyplace.com 02/05//07-Germans in New York

In today's excerpt, German immigrants in New York in the early 1800s:

"Second Avenue below Fourteenth Street possessed the distinction of acting as main street to a succession of ethnic enclaves, variously German, Austrian (Klein Wein), Hungarian (Goulash Row), Polish, and Ukrainian. It is best remembered for its half-century term as the Jewish Rialto, the home of the Yiddish theater, which at its peak was staged in as many as two dozen legitimate houses along the span.

"Among [First, Second and Third] avenues and east of them lay a patchwork quilt of ethnic settlements that periodically shifted or expanded with barely visible capillary motion. The German presence, which dominated the Lower East Side above Houston Street for half a century after the failure of the [Germanic] bourgeois revolution of 1848, was an exception to this rule by virtue of having had a distinct end. In the late nineteenth century, the Germans were probably the single most powerful minority in the city, establishing a strong network of political clubs, fraternal organizations, mannerchors, turnvereins, and a substantial press; and on Second Avenue, or Avenue A (Dutch Broadway), more people spoke the Saxon tongue than the Anglo-Saxon. Then, on June 15, 1904, 1,020 people of the neighborhood, mostly women and children, died in the wreck of the General Slocum, an excursion steamer which caught fire on the East River and broke up near North Brother Island. The victims, members of the Lutheran congregation of St. Mark's on Sixth Street, had been bound for their annual picnic and cruise on Long Island Sound; their vessel was a disaster waiting to happen, with rotting life jackets, unusable lifeboats, and an incompetent crew. The toll was such that the funeral procession made use of every hearse in the city. The tragedy broke the spirit of the neighborhood, and although a mass migration of the victim's families ensued, with the bulk of them relocating to Yorkville, the German community was never the same again. A decade later, rabid anti-German sentiments arising from World War I administered the coup de grace."

Luc Sante, Low Life, Vintage, 1991, pp. 15-6.

Delanceyplace.com 02/02/07-Mae West

In today's excerpt, vaudeville and Hollywood legend Mae West, known for such lines as "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted" and "It's better to be looked over, than overlooked":

"By 1938, she had already appeared in eight feature films that had propelled her from the status of a notorious Broadway trouble-maker to that of the movies' greatest comedienne. Her personal appearance tour caused ructions throughout the eastern states of the US: in Hartford ... the police were overwhelmed by a turnout of over 30,000 fans. ... In New York, Loew's State Theatre opened its doors at 8am and the jam of backstage 'autograph hounds' was so heavy that extra cops were deployed throughout the day. ...

"In 1929 she wrote, for The Parade, under the title 'Sex in the Theater':

" 'I have often been accused both by the press and individuals of deliberately appealing to the salacious and evil-minded. One can readily see how wrong that is, when you consider that I have played to more than ten million people in the US drawn from all walks of life, from the highest and the most intelligent to the lowest and the poorest. Ten million Americans can't all be salacious and evil-minded. When one can please the masses one must essentially be right.'

"The wonderful medium of theatre, Mae suggested, was ideal to bring those hidden educational truths home to ordinary people and to cast light on such concealed realities as the lives of prostitutes and the even less known facts of homosexual lives and loves. In three plays, Sex, The Drag, and Pleasure Man, written by herself, Mae had attempted to bring these lives to the attention of her eager audiences, only to be met with banning orders, court cases, and, in the case of Sex, an actual spell behind bars. Nevertheless, Mae vowed: 'I realized the problem and devoted my career in the theatre to the education of the masses. I shall boldly continue to do so, in spite of criticism, insults and narrow-minded bigots."

Simon Louvish, Mae West, St. Martin's Press, 2005, pp. xii-xv.

Delanceyplace.com 02/01/07-Non-Standard English

In today's encore excerpt, William Labov, in his groundbreaking 1970 article "The Logic of Nonstandard English," comments on both the language of scholarly journals and "middle class" language as compared to "working class" language:

"In high school and college, middle-class children spontaneously complicate their syntax to the point that instructors despair of getting them to make their language simpler and clearer. In every learned journal one can find examples of jargon and empty elaboration, as well as complaints about it. ... Isn't it ... turgid, redundant, bombastic, and empty? Is it not simply an elaborated style, rather than a superior code or system?

"Our work in the speech community makes it painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class speakers who temporize, qualify, and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail. Many academic writers try to rid themselves of that part of middle-class style that is empty pretension, and keep that part that is needed for precision. But the average middle-class speaker that we encounter makes no such effort; he is enmeshed in verbiage, the victim of sociolinguistic factors beyond his control.

"I will not attempt to support this argument here with systematic quantitative evidence, although it is possible to develop measures which show how far middle-class speakers can wander from the point. ..."

William Labov, "The Logic of Nonstandard English", Varieties of Present-Day English, R.W.Bailey and J.L. Robinson, Eds., 1973, pp. 329-30.