New Husky Football Coach

Seattle Times coverage here. The choice is Steve Sarkisian, presently the offensive coordinator and assistant head coach at the University of Spoiled Children (USC).

This is a bit riskier than some of the other choices on the table, like Pat Hill of Fresno State and Mike Leach of Texas Tech, but the upside potential seems high.

I am glad they got an early start. He can hit the ground running (and passing!) as soon as the Cal game ends on Saturday.

Only shades of gray ...

There is an old Monkees' song called Shades of Gray, the chorus to which is

But today there is no day or night
Today there is no dark or light.
Today there is no black or white,
Only shades of gray

This WaPo article on Obama's blackness, or rather his partial lack of blackness, reminded me of that song, as well as of Ursula LeGuin's novel The Lathe of Heaven, in which the protagonist can affect the world with his dreams. He starts to try to consciously manipulate this power; his attempt to end racism in this way succeeds as when he awakes everyone is gray. This is portrayed in the novel, as I recall, as something of a negative, but that is not so clear to me.

It strikes me that inter-marriage is the one sure-fire solution to racial and ethnic separation and discord. I am glad to see it rising in the US and extending to groups where historically it has been low, such as blacks and whites, as well as continuing in cases where it was already high, as with whites and Asians. This is just the melting pot, doing its good work.

Civics quiz

This civics quiz is fun. I got 33 out of 33 but then I am a bit of a wonk as well as a nerd.

The surrouding website is full of dire warnings about the sad state of civic knowledge. It seems to me that what we should be talking about instead is how to design a government that mimics the sewer system in the sense that it does its job well without most people having to have any idea how it works. There are no websites (well, you never know, but likely not many) lamenting the sad state of public knowledge of sewage disposal, no high school classes on sewage disposal and so on. But I am a dreamer, and likely doomed to a life of listening to people wring their hands about lack of public knowledge of various historical facts and obscure bits of institutional detail.

Do you object to Object?

The debate over sex industry policy continues in the UK. This Guardian piece describes a humorous hearing in which the case is made that lap dances are not sexual.

Active at the hearing is a UK group called Object. I really like the name as it works on two levels: they are concerned about women being treated as objects, and it is precisely this that they object to. Saith the Guardian:

But the committee also heard from two representatives of Object, a human rights organisation campaigning against the "sex object culture". Object wants lap dancing clubs to be classified as sex encounter establishments.

Sandrine Leveque, Object's advocacy officer, said: "Lap dancing clubs promote gender stereotypes and their expansion is therefore of concern to women's organisations up and down the country."

Ihave always found the "women as objects" line of argument odd for the following reason: we all treat almost all other people as objects almost all the time. When you are on a plane, you do not want to emotionally engage with the pilot and get to know her in the full richness of her humanity; rather, you want her to do her job and fly the plane. The same holds for the fellow behind the counter at Big Ten Burrito. We lack both the time and the emotional resources to do other than treat almost everyone as an object, something whose immediate value to us depends solely on their function, almost all the time. Thus, the issue is not objectification per se but rather knowing when and when not to treat women (or men) as objects. It strikes me that having socially established safe spaces in which both men and women can be treated as purely sexual objects makes it easier to not treat them as such the rest of the time and instead to treat them as objects whom we value for the other roles they play or, in certain cases, as fully realized individuals.

Oh, and one might, of course, argue that Object promotes some gender stereotypes of its own.

Job market advice: first, read the literature

Here is what you do not want if you are a graduate student on the market: you do not want a faculty member at a department you are applying for to open your job market paper, figure out the topic, look at the references and then immediately notice that you have not cited a recent, published paper that does what your does.

That is what happened when I opened [CANDIDATE'S] job market paper, which reminded me of [THIS PAPER] (gated) by my friend [THE ECONOMIST -TE], who is a full professor at the University of [CITY]. The job market candidate does not cite [TE'S] paper, even though it is published in a journal, [JOURNAL NAME], that is not particularly obscure, even though it was published three years ago and even though, if you happen to google, say, "[THREE OBVIOUS WORDS]" (roughly the topic of both papers) [TE'S] paper is the sixth entry on the first page.

To be clear, I am sure the omission was not deliberate, in the sense that I am sure that the candidate does not know about the paper. I suspect he just got enmeshed in the heat of research and neglected to do a thorough scouring of the literature (though, as noted, you don't have to scour very hard to find [TE'S] paper). I am also not saying that the job candidate has been scooped. His paper goes well beyond what [TE] does on several dimensions. I am just saying he was sloppy, and that is not the first impression that you want to make, especially in a year when a lot of schools are not hiring.

Addendum: someone with impeccable judgement convinced me over dinner last night that this post, though not all that very tough, was perhaps too tough, so I have anonymized it.

Australia

Not the place, the movie.

When I was growing up there was a show on every Sunday night at 7 PM called the "Wonderful World of Disney." One of the things it showed was essentially made-for-TV Disney movies, often stretched out over two or three Sundays.

This movie reminded me of one of those. The characters are completely one dimensional. Any character who is good is good in all ways; any character who is bad is bad in all ways. All white people except our two stars are bad, all Aboriginal people are good and much wiser than all the white people. I am very (very) sympathetic to the Australian aboriginals who have a really rich and beautiful spiritual tradition and whose treatment at the hands of the local whites stands out even relative to the US and Canada for its nastiness. But people are, outside this movie, still people.

Oh, and there are way too many really obvious blue screen shots.

Oh, and it sure is great to have an editor instead of just letting the movie run on and on and on and on for nearly three hours. I guess they ran out of money at the editing part.

I would give this one a pass.

Nifty blog

I just discovered this Economist blog on US politics.