Yesterday was busy. I spent nearly the entire day in meetings, managed to teach a class, and used the few gaps in my schedule to keep my inbox from getting completely out of control. Ah, the life of the mind. I’m not writing this to complain (OK, maybe a little) but to say this: One thing I like about this column (when I’m not cursing it) is that it forces me to read more than I otherwise would. The first thing I read this morning—a delight—was Dominic Green on Evelyn Waugh’s war years. Here’s a snippet: “A brave death was Waugh’s ideal. His fearless comportment under fire suggests that he wished to meet it: ‘May I share your trench?,’ he asked a covering Australian private before taking cover from a Stuka raid… But Layforce’s two battalions retreated up the road to Hora Sfakion before they were hard pressed. On May 28, Waugh established Layforce’s headquarters at an inn by a shaded spring at the village of Babali Hani (now Agii Pantes), close to the junction of the coastal road and the mountain road to Hora Sfakion. From this bucolic vantage, Waugh spent the day watching German dive bombers at work to his east: ‘It was like everything German—overdone.’”
Colin Greenwood reviews Michael Palin’s “poignant” Erebus: The Story of a Ship: “Months stretched into years, as the ships, just 102 feet long and each crammed with 60-odd men and supplies, became mired in the ice. The perpetual darkness and cold of the Arctic winter seem scarcely endurable. Palin draws together recent research to explain just how the men could have ended up in such a desperate state, weakened by scurvy, possibly lead poisoning too from poorly made tinned food, or the water system on board the ships.”
The funny and serious letters of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald. Mary Jo Salter reviews: “The humor can be sophomoric. I could do without the Polish jokes, which seemed funny once, but times have changed. (Anyone who has read Hecht’s poems concerning the Holocaust, particularly ‘More Light! More Light!’ and ‘The Book of Yolek,’ knows that his actual empathy with Poles ran deep.) You can’t resist all the jolliness, though, once letters have been set up with greetings like ‘My dear son,’ ‘Hey there Bud,’ ‘God’s Feet,’ ‘Ole Hoss,’ ‘Fellow Deliquescent,’ ‘Now see here, Fenwick,’ and ‘Peasant!’. The signatories to these letters include, but are hardly limited to, ‘Rutyard Coupling,’ ‘Irving of Arimathaea,’ ‘Sarah, Duchess of Marlboro Lights,’ and ‘Walter Ego.’ Sometimes it is the conjunction of opening and closing salvos that demands attention: A letter beginning ‘Dear Pearl Buck’ is signed ‘Marcel Proust.’ (It goes without saying that neither Buck nor Proust is even tangentially relevant to the letter in question.) Both Hecht and MacDonald wielded from time to time a rubber stamp with an interpretive message. More than one of Hecht’s letters is stamped, by himself, WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING. Solemnity does creep in, however, once we read the letters themselves. When unfunny things happened to either man—divorce, health problems, the death of near ones—they addressed each other soberly by their actual first names.”
Marc M. Arkin reviews Nick Bunker’s Young Benjamin Franklin: “For ordinary American readers, this may be a rather perplexing journey. Young Benjamin Franklin spends roughly as much time on Franklin’s British ancestors as it does on his scientific career; it follows him to just before his famous experiment flying a kite in a thunderstorm in the spring of 1752 that proved lightning was an electrical phenomenon. In other words, much of what makes Franklin important to Americans lies far in the future, and the connection with a remote past is far from clear. Instead, we see Franklin advancing from the leather-apron world in which he was born, forging connections among the grandees of Philadelphia, working at hard physical labor aided by Deborah who kept the books, making shrewd investments, forming civic organizations—in other words, a fairly conventional, albeit granular, account of Franklin’s early career and the people who surrounded him that lacks the sense that Franklin is going anywhere particularly special. When Bunker’s book concludes, the reader is hard-pressed to understand why Franklin did not end up in the same category as his friend and fellow American Cadwallader Colden—a minor government functionary and a footnote to the history of eighteenth-century science. Presumably, Bunker’s answer to Franklin’s future greatness is ‘ingenuity’ in the sense of charm, native wit, and energy, but that seems to explain both too much and too little at the same time.”
“Two Atlantic writers tour America in a tiny plane and manage to miss nearly everything that really matters.” Bill Steigerwald reviews James and Deborah Fallows’s Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America.
What’s it like to be a dinosaur bone smuggler? Not as interesting as you might think: “The life of a globe-trotting dinosaur smuggler might bring to mind Thomas Crown meets Tintin, but one of the revelations of the book is just how mundane the skulduggery of Prokopi’s crime actually was. He simply went to trade shows, saw who was dealing hot fossils in the open and made contacts. After repeated jaunts across the world to meet with an extremely shady (and often extremely drunken) Mongolian middleman, Prokopi establishes a pipeline for his purloined paleontological finds.”
Essay of the Day:
In National Affairs, Eli Lehrer writes that while the federal budget has ballooned in recent years, comparatively less money has been spent on public goods—things like “national defense, basic scientific research, and roads.” Lehrer argues that more spending on public goods would be a good thing. The problem is in deciding which public goods are “good”:
“There is little certainty as to which public goods are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad.’ That said, an overview of the most successful public-goods investments in American history reveals three rules of thumb for dealing with that uncertainty.
“First, the most successful investments in public goods have included visionary enterprises that likely could not have been justified beforehand with a strictly rational cost-benefit analysis. Ronald Reagan’s efforts to vastly increase the defense budget in the 1980s, for example, were made to “stand up to” the Soviet Union. These investments ultimately yielded a greater benefit: ending the rival superpower and ensuring an American victory in the Cold War. Significant investments in computing infrastructure by administrations from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton — which in turn laid the groundwork for the internet — were made merely because many people were enthusiastic about the capacity of computers to improve society rather than a highly specific idea of developing the World Wide Web.
“All of the justifications offered for the interstate highway system — everything from national defense to ‘urban renewal’ — paled in comparison to the economic benefits resulting from a cheap, free-at-point-of-service method of getting around the country. Single-family, detached houses became affordable for a great swath of America; more efficient, single-level manufacturing plans replaced multi-level ones; enclosed shopping malls largely replaced traditional downtowns as hubs of retail activity; and the reduced demand for passenger rail travel opened up more room for freight rail to transport goods at a lower price. It also stimulated sales of cars, fostered new types of businesses, and otherwise vastly changed the texture of American life.
“Second, successful investments in public goods have tended to produce ‘networks’ of various kinds rather than discrete benefits to a specific geographic area. These networks have consisted of large ventures that neither the private sector nor any state could accomplish alone. An isolated, 100-mile stretch of well-built highway would have changed almost nothing about American life; 48,000 miles of interstate highways created mass changes. Fundamental scientific discoveries also opened new vistas that were often impossible to foresee at the time they were created: Even Albert Einstein probably never realized that his theories of special and general relativity would make the GPS satellite constellation workable. On the other hand, the first transcontinental railroad line itself was of dubious value. The company that built the largest share of it, Union Pacific, entered bankruptcy just 24 years after work ended. No major cities ever developed along its route, and part of the rail bed was abandoned within 50 years. The railroad’s real value was in the network of track that attached to the specific line, which was built with a mix of public subsidies and private capital.
“Less-successful efforts to invest in public and quasi-public goods, like the Apollo program, have been unsuccessful precisely because they did not create such networks. And some of the least-successful efforts to create public goods — such as the biofuel-research efforts of the Synfuels Corporation during the early 1980s — were meant to accomplish what the private sector could have easily achieved if market pressure to do so had existed.
“Third, ‘good’ public goods — particularly those that exist as network infrastructure — have often done entirely new things rather than simply improving upon what already existed. The various problems of moving goods around by canal boat weren’t solved by building better canals, but rather by investing in rail. The issues associated with rail were solved largely with the advent of the interstate highway system. The internet, the most recent major deployment of network infrastructure, allows tasks that once required travel — like shopping and face-to-face meetings — to be accomplished virtually.
“All this said, not every public good can be justified on a practical basis; some worthy investments might break these rules.”
Photos: Typhoon Trami
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