A woman I work with recently asked me if I remembered Mike, Pam and Penny from the Dick and Jane readers. I assured her that she must have grown up with some bootleg version of the books because there certainly were no black characters in the series when I was a child.

Lo and behold - she was right. Back in the sixties, a black family actually did move in next door to Dick and Jane.

But by the time I got around to reading Dick and Jane in the late 70s early 80s, the black family was no where to be seen. Which raises the question, did the publishers create a transition title in the 70s called “White Flight with Dick and Jane” to explain why Mike, Pam and Penny were no longer around?

Dick: Look Sally. The moving truck is here. We are moving.
Sally: I am sad. What about our friends? Our friends Pam and Penny?
Jane: Oh no Sally. They are staying here.
Dick: Oh yes. They are staying. We are moving. Moving before the property values fall.

Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s upcoming book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

The excerpt traces the ways that America, much like Rome centuries ago, is privitizing government functions and what outcomes we can expect if we continue on course.

But I was really intrigued by the following two passages. Murphy notes that Geoffrey de Ste. Croix decided to trace the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word Suffragium which orginally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot”:

The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome’s republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning “ballot” no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system’s substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one’s behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.

Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: “a gift, payment or bribe.” By empire’s end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.

Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: “Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome.”

Murphy then looks at the simialr change in the word franchise:

The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can’t help lingering over the concept of “franchise,” wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning “free,” it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted “certain rights” acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company’s services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.

I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article in the New Yorker entitled, “Open Secrets”.

While the article is obstensibly about Enron, Gladwell is developing a much larger theme here about the shift, in our ever more complex world, from puzzles to mysteries. Puzzles have answers and simply require more information to solve. On the other hand, mysteries do not have precise answers and more data typically makes determing a likely outcome more difficult. The article explores this theme in the realms of business, medicine, and foreign intelligence.

Expect to see Gladwell dig up some other fun applications of the theory. This is just the type of sprawling topic with broad applicability that Gladwell can turn into a bestseller (seemingly) overnight.

Despite being an English literature major, I have always had a hard time reading novels. Unless I can devote a solid amount of time to becoming invested in a story, I find myself starting over at the beginning every time I sit down to read a book until I give up (and inevitably blame the book for being of a caliber incapable of winning over my attention).

Since I am back to the 9-5 (who are we kidding? 11 - 9) after graduating, I have fallen into a nightime routine that gives me enough time to get invested (turns out it wasn’t the books after all).

I just finished A Very Long Engagement last night. I hate reviews for lots of reasons. I fear I might say something about the book that is imprecise. I often can’t wrap my mind around precisely why I liked or didn’t like a particular work. In some instances I simply don’t want to deny others the exciting process of discovery that I had.

So this is my review:

The book contained two lines that caused me to stop reading dead in my tracks, filled with a jealousy I can’t remember ever having felt before. And this is officially the first and only book to make me consider learning French so that I could capture any hint of additional beauty that may have been lost in translation.

On a recommendation from Sheila, I recently read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It really captured my imagination. Much of the book is told from the perspective of a 9 year-old New Yorker with an over active imagination:

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

I absolutely love those last two lines.

My Friend Paul Rieckhoff will be reading from his new book Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington on Tuesday, Aug 22 at 7:00PM at The Strand in Manhattan. Paul is a veteran of the Iraq war and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).

Paul is as smart as they come and engaging speaker. You can see his recent appearances on Colbert Report, Fox News, and MSNBC’s Hardball.

This promises to be an insightful event and, if I know Paul, there will be a lively discussion following the reading.

The first person to tell Paul the name of the current Secretary of the VA will win a free signed copy of the book.

The photo below is from a book entitled Plans For Other Days, a book by Janfamily. Janfamily was founded by Royal College of Art graduates Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund. They were then joined by Daniel Jan Mair, Chosil Jan Kil, and Makin Jan Ma. Based in London, the group creates art projects that take such varied forms as songs, clothes, photography, and film.

I haven’t bought the book, but loved this image

via Youngna Park

Google has posted the collected works of Shakespeare on Google Book Search.