zin for breakfast

news in brief and some shoutouts

This article in the New Yorker explained the causes of the financial crisis with a comparison that I could actually understand: critical theory. Not that I understand most critical theory, but at least I understand it more than I understand financial markets. So we're getting somewhere.

Basically, the writer says that an article published in 1973 called “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities” was pretty much "The Waste Land" or the Ulysses for the world of finance. New techniques were evolving. You could do things that people just didn't do before. And now, with the whole evaporation of "value," we've suddenly found ourselves with Gravity's Rainbow, and everyone is like, "What the hell is this?"

Here's the punch line, in case you're impatient:

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

In other news, saddest headline ever: Mars Lander Succumbs to Winter. I think the NY Times must have gotten someone from obits to write the story. First line of the article: "The Pheonix Mars Lander is dead."

Despite the Lander's demise, Principle Mission Investigator Peter H. Smith is apparently "'thrilled to death at what we've been able to do here.'" No one else at NASA seems too broken up about it either: "'It’s really an Irish wake, not a funeral that we’re looking forward to,' said Douglas McCuiston, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA headquarters. 'NASA got what it wanted out of this mission.'"

Well as long as NASA got what it wanted.

But the end is where it really got tragic:

In the coming months, when sunlight disappears entirely in the northern plains, temperatures will fall to minus-240 to minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Phoenix will become encased within carbon dioxide ice. When spring returns, NASA plans to try reviving the Phoenix again, but the expectation is that the spacecraft’s electronics will not survive the long, deep freeze.

RIP Mars Lander, and also, RIP school bake sales.  

And thank you to the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, featuring not only a Bouchon Bakery (they weren't kidding about those macarons),  but also a Whole Foods, where I found cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, which I haven't seen since Sonoma, AND La Tur, which I swear is the cheese of the gods, introduced to Erik and Heather and me this summer by Ravenswood Jack. $13 worth of delicious cheesy nostalgia went into my basket, and I didn't feel guilty, not one bit.

And, finally, to the woman tonight listening to her iPod so loudly that the entire bus could hear Boyz II Men's "End of the Road"blasting from her earbuds, I was feeling it. "Purple Rain," though? Not so much.

we can care, yes we can

By the time we left the bar, it was almost 11. Obama had Pennsylvania and Ohio, but Virginia, Florida, and Colorado were still too close to call. Western states hadn't even closed their polls. We knew it was looking good for Obama, though. Besides, the bar was getting crowded and the men were getting sketchy.

When Christa and I parted ways at the entrance to the L train, I could already hear cheers spilling from bars and open windows. On the platform, three girls had popped a bottle of champagne and were taking swigs without inhibition. A train came in on the opposite platform, and when the doors opened, more shouting erupted from inside the cars. Everyone on board cheered for everyone getting on, and then the party train jolted on. My train was quieter, relatively speaking, but I could look out and see people celebrating on every stop along the way. While transferring at 8th street, a girl in skinny jeans and converse was saying, "I can't believe he's our President. I can't believe he's our President," over and over to a boy with a pink skateboard.

I'm not being dramatic when I say that I've never witnessed anything like this. I've never peen a part of anything like this. I couldn't walk a block down the street today without hearing the name "Obama." I waited in line for an hour and a half with a bunch of people who were, for the most part, utterly thrilled to be voting. New York Times photographers were there. I even took a few pictures myself.

I did some phone-banking on 125th street this afternoon, in a conference room with close to 100 other volunteers. I called people in Virginia to remind them to vote. Yesterday I called people in Indiana from a different conference room across town. Why did I do that? It never would have crossed my mind to do something like that, even earlier in this same election.

Something happened, though, in the past few weeks, or maybe it's been happening for longer. Maybe it's that crazy liberal media. Maybe I finally realized what a good-looking guy that Obama fellow is.  Maybe it's because I'm living in New York, where everything feels very immediate, even national politics. But more likely it has to do with people around me, people who are older and wiser and whom I trust, telling me that this is the most important election of their lifetime. And I think that's what people are trying to get at when they keep calling it a "historic" night. Not because Obama's black or McCain is old, but because it's coming at a particular moment in history--a turning point, if you'll forgive me the cliche, for the country and the world--that I don't think we'll appreciate until we can look back on this period as history.

(Clearly I've been brainwashed by some of the rhetoric I've heard tonight.)

So I got on the A train, and I headed home. People with his name written across their faces, shirts, stickers, excited chatter. Sometimes Manhattan can feel like the loneliest place on earth, and other times it's as though all 1.6 million of us are on the exact same page. I actually had this same thought last week on Halloween, when the city was overrun with costumed revelers. There's a certain solidarity that comes from jerking and jolting through the subways in a '70s disco outfit alongside Bert, Ernie, and three slutty pirates. That's the kind of solidarity I felt tonight, but it was a hundred times more powerful.

Coming up onto the streets, and cars were honking, kids leaning out the windows, shouting "O-BA-MA." People were running through the streets, taking pictures with their phones, calling someone to say, "You should be here to see this." Then, I swear to you, there were fireworks. Right there behind me while I walked to my building. They must have been coming straight out of Central Park, but I don't think they were planned or even legal. Regardless, that's when I started to cry. I know! I can't believe it either. You have to understand, though, that I love stuff like this. I love the feeling, however brief and illusory, that we're all in this together.

I got into my room just in time to watch Obama's acceptance speech and cry some more. Seeing all those people in Chicago and D.C., and then in Harlem, on 125th, fewer than 12 blocks from where I was sitting--it was overwhelming. It reaffirmed to me that there is something special about this time around. No matter what happens during Obama's presidency, the fact that all those hundreds of thousands of people assembled, the fact that many of them were brought to tears along with countless others sitting in their homes like me, says that he's already accomplished something huge. He's made people care.

If you know me, you know that I love America. I know, it's funny, right? I love it in the sense that I love looking at it, studying it, and I love writing about all its contradictions and absurdities. Though I've always felt lucky to have been born here, I would never have called myself a patriot. As a liberal, post-9/11 college grad, I'd come to think of "patriotism" as pretty much a dirty word, and so I've limited my love to the perspective of a bystander, a detached observer. This is the kind of skewed perspective you adopt when the same embarrassment of a president has been in office since you were 14. But now I want to care about what happens to my country. I want a president who isn't afraid to tell me that I need to make sacrifices for the good of my country. And I want to be able to say "I love America" without a trace of irony. Actually, a little irony is okay. The point is that, in this election, I voted not only with my head but also with my heart/gut/tummy feeling, and it's this second half that I hope is going to make a difference.