Category — Politics

“It’s hard to check responsible consumption at the door and go back to mass-produced things that have no stories to tell,” says Bradford Shane Shellhammer in a Wall Street Journal piece by David Sokol (4/21/12). Bradford is co-founder and chief creative officer of Fab dot-com, a flash-sale website specializing in simple designs for household items. For example, Fab recently featured “garden tools created by a Montana blacksmith and forged-steel lighting made in Illinois that the site described as having an ‘unpretentious, minimalist sensibility with a rough-hewn edge’.”

David McFadden, curator of the Museum of Art and Design, says the appeal is a “lingering response to the economics of the past few years.” Ruth Storc, who keeps a blog called Design Patriot, agrees: “People are interested in all things artisanal, because they want to know where the things they live with are being made and by whom,” adding: “Perhaps there is a bit of backlash against globalization and technology.” Tyler Hays, founder of BDDW, a furniture designer, also notes that American labor costs are now more competitive with Chinese, and besides, “you can spend $4 in fossil fuel for shipping a $10 item overseas.”

Such forces are fueling a design trend becoming known as New American Minimalism that features “reserved shapes, natural materials, apparent construction and hand finishing.” For consumers, says designer Kimberly Ayres, the “basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out” while “the handmade quality is grounding.” For BDDW, it’s also smart business. “We’re making a bigger profit on pieces made in America than stuff made in China, and there’s huge, huge interest at the Anthropologie price point,” Tyler says. “It’s green and good for the economy,” he adds. “Local fits everybody’s agenda.”

“Since the rise of middle-class prosperity after World War II, cars have been an extraordinary window into the country’s culture and mood,” writes Paul Ingrassia in a Wall Street Journal excerpt from his book, Engines of Change (4/20/12). That window opened in a big way, of course, with the 1950s appearance of tail fins, which were both inspired by fighter planes as well as “powerful totems of America’s peacetime bounty.” The fin-wars escalated between General Motors and Chrysler, peaking with the 1959 Cadillacs, which “had the tallest tail-fins ever appended to a vehicle that didn’t fly.”

Fins became progressively smaller after that, “and disappeared entirely by 1965. By then, extravagance in car design had spawned a backlash. Volkswagen was selling some 150,000 Beetles a year in the US by the mid-1960s,” and became an icon of “the 1960s counterculture.” Another icon of a different sort — the Ford Mustang — “debuted in April 1964, just as America’s first Baby Boomers were coming of age. The car caused a sensation, even though it was built on the chassis of the dull and dowdy Ford Falcon.” Seymour Marshak, Ford’s marketing chief at the time, compared the Mustang’s lines to those of a woman.

The 1970s saw the introduction of the AMC Gremlin, which was “designed on the back of a Northwest Airlines airsickness bag and launched on April Fools’ Day, 1970″ … and was perhaps was a metaphor for the ensuing decade. The 1980s gave rise to yet another Baby Boomer icon, “the revolutionary Chrysler minivan,” which “quickly became the preferred vehicles of ‘soccer moms,’ who were becoming a formidable force in America’s political landscape.” The minivan led to SUVs as well as renewed interest in pickup trucks,which are political icons in their own right, most recently in Scott Brown’s 2010 campaign to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat (link).

The Obama campaign is turning to "computing experts, mathematicians, programmers and statisticians" — boffins — to try to help attract voters, reports the Economist (2/11/12). The campaign actually has a “chief scientist,” Rayid Ghani, “a leading light in an area of applied science called knowledge discovery and data-mining — techniques that are frequently used by corporations to crunch vast quantities of data in the search for interesting patterns about customers.”

Rayid’s job is to analyze a “torrent of data and predict voting patterns, allowing the Obama campaign to target its spending more accurately and cost-effectively.” Such data links “names and addresses of voters … with everything from magazine subscriptions and home ownership to hunting licenses and credit scores.” As in 2008, the campaign will also “use online experiments to work out which messages are most effective.”

Last time around, for example, the Obama campaign found that a “learn more” button was more effective than “sign up now” in terms of getting voters to submit their email addresses. This time, however, social-media is more crowded, and candidates “can expect less free, word-of-mouth advertising on it.” Then again, Facebook now offers “paid advertisements by zipcode, as well as by political affiliation, age and interests.” The president, meanwhile, perhaps seeking novel, lower-cost channels, recently signed up for Instagram, “a “slightly hip photo-sharing network.”

"Twitter has changed the whole way that politics works," says Obama operative Teddy Goff in a New York Times piece by Ashley Parker (1/29/12). "Not just the press element," says Teddy, "but the organizing element and the fund-raising element and the relationship-building that all campaigns try to do." Mitt Romney’s digital director, Zac Moffatt, agrees that Twitter has changed the game, politically. "Twitter is the ultimate real-time engagement mechanism, so it’s moved everything to a much faster speed," he says. "You have no choice but to be actively engaging at all times."

For example, the Romney team uses Twitter to track stories reporters are flagging so they can give their boss a head’s up on likely questions from the press. They also use it to create hashtags aimed at opposing candidates: After Newt Gingrich referred to his own ideas as "grandiose," the Romney campaign "sent mocking Twitter messages with a hashtag #grandiosenewt and encouraged supporters to do the same. Romney has also been on the receiving end, with the #what10Kbuys hashtag unleashed by Democrats, in reference to a wealth-related Romney gaffe.

Rick Santorum helped turn out his troops on the morning of the Iowa Caucuses by paying for a "promoted" message that showed up at the top of Twitter for searches on the #IACaucuses hashtag. During the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich "used Twitter to reach out to voters who had posted positively about guns." The Obama camp posts lines from the President’s speeches to see "which are the most shared." Twitter, says Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, is "basically a focus group." Gingrich spokesperson R.C. Hammond, meanwhile, likes how Twitter "has applied the Strunk and White rules to writing press releases … Be short, be pithy, be engaging," he says.

The existence of the Higgs boson could have cultural, if not practical, applications, suggests Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal (12/19/11). But before either can happen, we need to have at least some understanding of what Higgs boson is. Unlike other scientific discoveries, Higgs boson doesn’t lend itself to shorthand understanding the way black holes, genes, or vaccination do. Nor does it readily translate into metaphor, in the manner of light year, Darwinian or DNA. That’s probably because Higgs boson has to do with "the mysterious manifestation of the field that causes matter to have mass." Indeed.

In hopes of connecting this abstract concept to the real world, William Waldegrave, a British science minister, in 1993 challenged an assembly of scientists to explain on a single page what Higgs boson is and why we should care. Hundreds attempted, and five (link) were picked as winners, among them David Miller, who used Margaret Thatcher entering a room of supporters as a metaphor. The supporters are uniformly distributed until Lady Thatcher enters, at which point they "cluster around her," stopping her progress.

"Once moving, she is harder to stop, and once stopped, she is harder to get moving again," David wrote. He also compared the situation to "a rumor spreading through the party, causing a wave of local clustering." Matt says the only point here may be knowledge itself, but also notes that satellite navigation wouldn’t work without the theory of general relativity, which otherwise might seem esoteric. From a cultural standpoint, he suggests that "the way a bureaucracy impedes, delays and weighs down a simple course of action could henceforth be described as Higgsian," and those who impede progress be rebuked, as in "Don’t be such a Higgs boson!" Could be just what we need in 2012 …

Long Island City is dabbling in art therapy as a form of public policy, reports Martha Schwendener in the New York Times (12/13/11). The Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park asked four artists to offer their solutions to "unchecked development, the loss of affordable housing and the chemical hangover of industrialization." Their concepts are currently being featured in an exhibition called Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City.

Natalie Jeremijenko offers "Feral Robots," or "cast-off robot toys outfitted with computer components for sniffing out pollutants in contaminated soil; awnings that collect solar-energy; and bags you can hang over your apartment balcony to grow food." She also proposes "hula hoops filled with wildflower seeds and biomimetic wings for personal travel. " Rirkrit Tiravanija proposes "drivable" grass and opening a community kitchen.

Mary Miss suggests turning "four giant smokestacks … into a kind of eco-feedback center registering environmental changes that would be visible to the community." Whether any of these concepts "will make it out of the gallery and into the world" is, of course, an open question. The stated goal, however is simply to "’spark an ongoing dialogue’ between the creative sector and the community." It is based on the premise that "civic change isn’t merely about infrastructure, but addressing ‘psychological barriers.’"

"The behaviors of someone running for president and someone trying to gain market viability are exactly the same," says Rick Tyler in a New York Times piece by Trip Gabriel (12/9/11). Rick is a onetime aide to Newt Gingrich and sometime co-author of the former speaker’s many books. He’s responding to a certain controversy over Mr. Gingrich’s practice of "selling and signing $25 copies of his books" while running for president. Critics apparently find it unseemly that Gingrich is monetizing his presidential run with book signings (profits go directly to him, personally, not campaign coffers).

"People who are seriously considering someone for president of the United States, I’m not sure they see that the process should be financially beneficial to the candidate," says Jim Dyke, a former Republican National Committee executive. "I don’t know that it presents a presidential feeling to be there pushing your own book." However, Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 campaign, says "we live in a new age," and suggests that selling books while running for president is simply part of the Gingrich package. There’s no law against it.

Gingrich, himself, says his books represent "the cultural wing of what we’re doing," adding: "I am a cultural teacher, with a political campaign to change a government. And that’s how I see myself." He says he is planning to promote his latest novel, which is about black Union troops during the Civil War, during Black History Month. Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann have also made book signings part of their presidential campaigns this season, and Republican consultant Mark McKinnon thinks voters see the events "as just making the candidates more substantive."

Politicians write novels "to create braver, smarter, more powerful versions of themselves," writes Michael Moynihan in the Wall Street Journal (12/10/11). Politicians who have succumbed to this particular temptation include Gary Hart, Ed Koch, Bob Graham, Scooter Libby and Barbara Boxer. Even Winston Churchill couldn’t resist attempting a novel, Savrola, published in 1899. Jimmy Carter has actually attempted a book of poetry, as has former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who has published two volumes of verse. Some critics say these efforts couldn’t be verse.

Few, if any, of these works of political fiction has achieved anything close to either critical or popular acclaim. The goal, apparently, is "a desire to use the novel to write ideological history." For example, William Cohen’s latest novel, Blink of an Eye, "is a rather obvious morality tale whose lesson parallels Mr. Cohen’s own opposition to the Iraq War: Don’t base momentous foreign-policy decisions on dubious intelligence." Bob Graham, a former senator, meanwhile says he was inspired to write a novel, Keys to the Kingdom, to address unanswered questions about the September 11th attacks.

Graham says he turned to fiction because "there were some things I wanted to say that I didn’t think I could do in nonfiction." Similarly, presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to anchor his novels "in specific moments in history — especially those periods or episodes viewed as morally unambiguous, like World War II or the Civil War." He told an interviewer that his "purpose" in writing about Pearl Harbor was "to remind people how real these kinds of dangers are." His latest novel, The Battle of the Crater, meanwhile, is intended to convey that the 2012 election is "as crucial a turning point for the nation as the eve of the Civil War."

A. Lee Fritschler thinks the US Postal Service “should be viewed not as a communications medium but as a broadcasting medium,” writes Randall Stross in The New York Times (10/2/11). He’s referring, of course, to the reality that the Postal Service is mostly in the business of “spraying messages” versus sending letters. “Stamped mail” has declined “47 percent since 2001″ while “standard mail” — the kind sent in bulk for marketing purposes — “dropped only eight percent over the same period.” Either way, the Postal Service is looking at losses, of course, to the tune of “a projection of nearly $10 billion for 2011.”

The American Postal Workers Union meanwhile argues that this decline is because of the recession’s effect on advertising budgets. “As the nation and the world emerge from economic stagnation, hardy-copy mail volume will expand,” the Union states on its website. However, this, says Randall “ignores the rise of the internet, and its ever-growing use for checking bills or sending payments.” Of course, the internet theoretically could help close the gap, given that “our use of package delivery services … has grown with e-commerce.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that the Postal Service is now “on the brink of default unless Congress comes to the rescue.” This raises the question of whether the US Congress should subsidize “the private interests that use the service to distribute advertising cheaply.” That’s not what happened in 1861, when the Pony Express was quickly shut down by its private investors once the transcontinental telegraph was in place. Now, 150 years later, Randall writes, “we have a delivery service whose rasion d’etre is rapidly vanishing before our eyes … and we are paralyzed, unable to decide what to do.”

A crew of young and scruffy German internet activists are forcing conventional politics to walk the plank, reports Nicholas Kulish in the New York Times (9/20/11). The Pirate Party, promising "liquid democracy," shocked Germany’s political status quo by winning 8.9 percent of the vote and 15 seats in the state parliament. To an extent, their electoral success was a protest vote, but some suggest larger implications. "In the internet, they have really found an underexploited theme that the other political parties are not dealing with," says Christoph Bieber of the University of Duisburg-Essen.

These themes include "online privacy" and "data protection," and are rooted in the reality that young people "often spend half their waking hours online, much of it on social networking sites where they share their most intimate moments." In addition, "the Pirates’ call for complete transparency in politics resonates powerfully." To that end, the Pirates "have promised to use online tools to give party members unprecedented power to propose policies and determine stances, in what they call ‘liquid democracy,’ a form of participation that goes beyond simply voting in elections."

"Today’s cadre of politicians is missing out on asking some very relevant questions about the future," says Rick Falkvinge, who founded the Pirate Party in Sweden in 2006. Rick says that, because of the internet, "you don’t have to take these laws being read to you … You can stand up, stand tall and write the laws yourself." So far, the Pirate Party is overwhelmingly the enclave of "young men who spend their evenings writing computer code," but the Pirates say this will change. In the meantime, party leader Andreas Baum says they’ve already made a difference. "The very fact that these other parties are now asking themselves how we won these votes is already progress."