The death of Borders.

"Borders Group Inc. said it would liquidate after the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain failed to receive any offers to save it."

I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971 when the first Borders opened there. Before then, we browsed for books at Centicore. Whatever happened to Centicore? I don't know, but Borders went big, and back in the 1990s, I loved the big Borders in Madison, Wisconsin. I went there almost every day, usually with one or both of my sons. Many times we left with a stack of books — usually after spending money in the café. Then came the day — in the late 90s? — when I asked at the information desk if they had WiFi. The guy manning the station gave me an attitude-filled "WiFi?" — as if I was looking for something stupid.

There was a narrative arc to Borders, and my own life followed that arc... up until the point where it diverged.

ADDED: I am reminded of my January 23, 2009 post "Despite shrines to Obama, the bookstore was nearly deserted."

Where is everyone? It's about 5:30 p.m. here at Borders, and I feel as though I've stayed until after closing time. I used to like to go here to browse alongside myriad strangers and to run into people I knew. Now, there's zero "town square" ambiance.

Here's a title that made me feel good about the way my reading about current politics has, in the past few years, migrated nearly completely on-line:



"What Obama Means." Spare me. Whatever is in that book can — I will bet you — be skimmed and understood in less than one minute.

"What will it take for my Republican colleagues to wake up to the fact that they’re playing a game of political chicken with the entire global economy?"

Says Harry Reid, as if "chicken" is a one-sided game.



The question is: Who's the James Dean here and who's the "aaaahhhhh!" guy? We know the American people are Sal Mineo.

"On average, married heart attack victims arrived at the hospital half an hour sooner than those who were not married."

"But when the researchers analyzed the data separately for men and women, they found that while married men were more than 60 percent less likely to arrive late than their single peers, there was no statistically significant difference between married and single women."

This is like that asking-for-directions thing, isn't it? Women are more inclined to seek help, while men like to try to solve problems on their own?

Should unmarried men read this and think I should get a woman, because it might save my life? Of course not! We don't know the full causal effect of these wives. Sure, they got their man to the hospital faster, but why did the man have the heart attack? Maybe she stressed him out with all the nagging about other things he was always supposed to seeking help with, things he could do by himself, wanted to do for himself, and wanted that wife to believe he could do.

NOTE: Stereotypes refer to averages within groups, not what real human individuals do. Personally, I'm not the help-seeking type. I'm just responding to a newspaper article on the level at which it is pitched.

"Penile length alone can explain over 15% of the between-country variation in 1985 GDP."

"Startlingly the male organ coefficients are statistically significant at
the 1% level in all model specifications."

Scholarship!

At the Deep Water Sunset Café...

... please share your superior thoughts.

"If Pawlenty was deeply annoyed to have to talk about Bachmann, a back-bencher in the state Senate when he was elected governor in 2002, who could really blame him?"

From "The Tragedy of Tim Pawlenty":

“Pawlenty has always been the establishment in Minnesota and Bachmann has always been the renegade,” says University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs. “Pawlenty thought that she was kind of a crackpot. He would roll his eyes when her name came up.” Democrat Roger Moe — the former longtime majority leader of the state Senate who lost the 2002 gubernatorial race to Pawlenty — describes his rival as “the kind of guy you can have a beer with” despite their political differences. But Moe cannot resist chuckling: “I can just tell you — I know for sure on the inside of him—that Tim Pawlenty is just seething over Bachmann. I bet they have to lock him in a room some days when he reads about her.”

Those stray quotes could be complete garbage, or, if not garbage, totally about the 2 individuals Pawlenty and Bachmann, but I can't help hearing the eternal theme of male reacting to female: The woman does not know her place. When she speaks, I hear crazy.

Missing from the Wisconsin recall election ads: the subject of collective bargaining that started all the protests.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports on the 9 recall elections and the massive ad campaigns:

The ads that have aired in recent weeks have delved into candidates’ personal histories, gaffes and legal problems, into the broader battle over the state budget, and into federal issues like Medicare.

Gov. Walker’s push against collective bargaining for public employees is mostly absent from the broadcast advertising, either because strategists believe most voters have made up their mind about that issue or because they think other messages are more effective....

And here's Jack Craver in the Isthmus:

WTDY, the radio station where I work part-time, can't get in touch with Democratic candidates for Senate. They're apparently not interested in discussing why "big labor" is only a big issue for Republicans now. Democrats make little mention of the issue that brought about this historic opportunity to take back the State Senate....

Democrats get tons of money from unions, but they get even more from corporations. I would argue that the party's current posture on unions is evidence of its attempt to straddle straddle both interests.

Well, the Wisconsin protests were about public employee unions, so it should be easy to avoid that conflict... unless the project of supporting public employee unions depends on confusing people.

Craver continues, with lines that may be the norm in Madison but should raise eyebrows in the rest of the state:

What's incredible, however, is how willingly the American people entertain the notion that the Democratic Party is anti-business or left wing. Let's be clear: There is no American left. There used to be. But the right has taken over the dialogue in the last 30 years, and convinced us that any move towards an economic system championed by Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower represents an attack against American capitalist values.

Hmmm. Let me guess why the Democratic candidates don't want to be on Craver's radio show!

The plight of the independent — right wing? — blogger.

Right Wing News has a piece called "The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere," and the part that jumped out at me isn't about where one is on the political spectrum:

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20?

Actually, there are a lot of people who do that: artists, retired folk, stay-at-home spouses, people who already have enough money, the disabled, and the hardcore believer. You know when you are writing for the intrinsic value of writing (and reaching readers) and when you are writing for money (or some combination of the 2). The thought that you are "put[ting] in 20-30-40-50 hours a week" nags in the head of a person who is doing it for money.

After 1 year of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law — what good has it done?

Bloomberg editorial:

Consumer advocates, many congressional Democrats and some economists say banks are still too big, the derivatives market remains untamed and opaque, and regulators have been slow to write hundreds of rules. The financial industry and Republican lawmakers, on the other hand, say regulators have gone overboard, hobbling financial firms with onerous demands, creating regulatory uncertainty and slowing the economic recovery.

Superior sunset.

Looking out at the Apostle Islands.

At the Puffy Red Café...

... I really don't see what you're so proud of.

"IC Solutions CEO Joe Stafford, who takes time to reread the 1,100 pages of the pro-capitalism novel Atlas Shrugged every two years..."

"... says he doesn't 'have enough time in the day to bother with' the 94 pages of Cheese."

From a 2002 USA Today article about the popularity of the book "Who Moved My Cheese?" I stumbled across that article as a result of reading the "Who Moved My Cheese?" article in Wikipedia, which I did because I said "Who Moved My Cheese?" — in a conversation with Meade about the troubles he (like others) was having with the new comments format on this blog — and I then realized that I'd long assumed I knew what "Who Moved My Cheese?" meant and, moreover, that Wikipedia would probably summarize the book, which it did. I learned that I was kind of wrong about what "Who Moved My Cheese?" was about. I thought it was about the way fussy people are disconcerted by small changes in their environment.

Some managers are known to mass-distribute copies of the book to employees, some of whom see this as an insult, or an attempt to characterize dissent as not "moving with the cheese". In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural re-organization," or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. 

So that's why it was a big bestseller for 5 years. People were buying it for other people.

4 Questions:

1. Have you ever been insulted by a book someone gave you to read? Have you ever — be honest — insulted anyone with a gift book?

2. What 2 things in your life are equivalent to Joe Stafford's "Atlas Shrugged" and "Who Moved My Cheese?"? (That is: You have time for something that take a lot of time, but you don't have time for something else in the same category that takes very little time.)

3. What catchphrase have you discovered yourself to be using incorrectly because you never bothered to partake of the source material?

4. If you had to think of a parable off the top of your head, do you think you could come up with something better than "Who Moved My Cheese?" and if so, does it irritate you that Dr. Spencer Johnson had that big-ass best seller? (Next time write a parable that will be useful propaganda for people with money and the motivation to make a lot of insult-gifts.)

Tweaking the template.

You may have noticed a few tweaks around here. There's the "Who is Althouse? ✼ How can I contribute?" in the banner. The picture of me in the sidebar is now the width of the Blogads (and no longer accompanied by my name and some added text). The post titles aren't orange-ish anymore. And the format for posting a comment is different.

The comments system is the same, but I've seen a little confusion about it. You have to "select a profile," using the drop-down menu showing 6 ID formats. You only need to do that the first time, and if you were commenting before, you've done it before. You just don't remember.

Also, there are 2 buttons: "Post Comment" and "Preview." If you feel like you're encountering a 2-step process, it's because you hit the "Preview" button. Just read the buttons, and pick "Post Comment" if you don't like previewing.

Please move beyond this initial confusion and take note of how much cleaner and prettier the comments page looks than they old orange-and-tan thing it has replaced.

Finally, you may wonder why I'm fussing with the Blogger aesthetics when I've been saying I'm moving out of Blogger onto an independent site. It's because I'm seriously considering staying with Blogger. I won't trouble you with the problems of moving a blog this big to a new site, but they are huge. I have — with the help of some good people at Google — gotten a full export of my archive (comments and all). But there are many more problems with the transition, and having experienced some nice treatment from Google, I'm quite likely to stay here now.

ADDED: I've gone back to the old comments format. The new one, while prettier, was preventing some people from posting.

"Should a two-time Oscar-winner like Jane Fonda really be making a spectacle out of the fact that she wanted to appear on a home-shopping channel?"

Asks Big Hollywood, noting Jane's plaint:

I was to have been on QVC today to introduce my book, “Prime Time,” about aging and the life cycle....

The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear.

Bottom line, this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.

Big Hollywood has a few quibbles with some of those assertions.

Poor Jane! Getting old... and just wants to sell her book about getting old. We're all getting old, and Jane has always been about capturing — and purveying — the spirit of whatever time she happened to be in. With that mindset, it's hard to understand the depth of feeling some people have about the past.

Remember 80s Jane?

"Rebekah Brooks has been arrested..."

"... by police investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World and allegations that police officers were bribed to leak sensitive information."

... Brooks, 43, resigned on Friday as News International's chief executive. She is a former News of the World editor and was close to Rupert Murdoch and the prime minister, David Cameron.

"When it comes to social issues like abortion, public prayer, and Church-state topics, are you politically conservative, moderate, or liberal?"

That's the wording of the "social issues" question on the Rasmussen poll (which we were discussing here).

Using that form for the question — highlighting those 3 issues — 40% of "likely voters" identified themselves as conservative, 31% said liberal, and 26% said moderate. I'm wondering how the results might have varied if 3 other issues had been used to create the impression of what "social issues" means. Obviously, the question over-emphasizes religion. It's also confusing about religion. What is "public prayer"? If you're in a church congregation, you are in public. The President says "God bless America." Saying "prayer in public schools" would have more clearly framed the issue that divides people. But that's a "Church-state topic," so why list it separately?

What if the 3 issues were: abortion, prayer in public schools, and gay rights? Or: abortion, prayer in public schools, and affirmative action? Do you think the percentages would come out different?

Sometimes people — e.g., Mitch Daniels — say that Republicans would do better if they downplayed or ignored the social issues. But "social issues" is an abstract and variable concept. The question should be which social issues to highlight in order to shape the voters' impression of what the social issues are in order to cause them to identify as conservative, moderate, or liberal.

I'm more likely to say I'm conservative if I think of "social issues" as...
	Abortion, public prayer, and church-state topics
	Abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action
	Abortion, gay rights, and church-state topics
	Abortion, prayer in school, and affirmative action
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