With devotion, and, some say, obsession, they have fueled the thriving, $2.5 billion scrapbooking industry, an ever-expanding, ever-more-elaborate supply of photo-safe minutiae: corner lacing punches and circle cutters, rickrack and paisley paper and brads eyelets and packages of thematic word stickers -- on love, on vacation, on childhood -- the better to frame a life.

What's driving the phenomenon? One theory is that it creates an excuse for sociability while allowing time for personal enjoyment. I suspect that scrapbookers find their hobby a deeply satisfying source of "flow". But will anyone, except maybe 22nd-century social historians, really want to look at these scrapbooks?

Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist with Context-Based Research Group, a company that studies consumer behavior for such clients as the Campbell Soup Co., spent a while observing the scrapbooker. He concluded that what Ballard described as "going out and coming in" was at the root of the phenomenon and others such as the iPod. Blinkoff calls the underlying trend "alone, together."

"It makes me feel part of a larger community, but it also grows my sense of self," he said. "That's what scrapbooking does, especially for moms, who have no time to be creative these days."

And yet, among their thousands and thousands of photos, women tend to include very few, if any, photos of themselves, often because they don't like to be photographed or are reluctant to relinquish control of how their descendants will view their lives in 100 years.

Like Steve, I'm sorry that theater attendance is down. I like to see movies in a dark room with other people. Of course, I don't like it when those other people talk or bring their squirmy, loudmouth kids. And I do think movies are pricing themselves out of the market, forgetting that they have competition for your entertainment dollar.

I didn't see that many movies in 2005, but I second his recommendations of Downfall, which was absolutely riveting, and Layercake. And, like him, I had fun at Mr. and Mrs. Smith, even though I understand the critics' objections.

Interestingly, when Shane Frederick asks a different version of the question, substituting a difference of 13 cents for a bagel and banana totaling 37 cents, many fewer people get the answer wrong--because it's not intuitive.

The X Prize Foundation, a nonprofit-education organization, is looking to spur a new adventure -- into human genes.

The Santa Monica, Calif., foundation plans to offer a $5 million to $20 million prize to the first team that completely decodes the DNA of 100 or more people in a matter of weeks, according to foundation officials and others involved.

Such speedy gene sequencing would represent a technology breakthrough for medical research. It could launch an era of "personal" genomics in which ordinary people can learn their complete DNA code for less than the cost of a wide-screen television.

The X Prize Foundation's website is here.

The Original Amos 'n' Andy -- Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll, and the 1928-43 Radio Serial

My question: do you think that Amos 'n' Andy - or any other specific radio stars of the late '20s-early '30s era (perhaps Rudy Vallee?) - helped drive radio sales, and thereby hasten the heyday of great radio entertainment?

Or was it a more general thing - that RCA created a National Broadcasting Company to encourage radio sales... and the talent then rose up to fill the airwaves with that needed entertainment?

There's a lot of anecdotal talk to the effect that many people bought their first radios to listen to "Amos 'n' Andy" during 1929-30, but I don't think it's realistic to claim that the fad surrounding the program was the major engine driving radio sales during that era. There were numerous other factors as well.

The most important of these factors involved the evolution of radios themselves. Beginning around 1925, radio sets evolved from crude-looking boxes festooned with knobs and jacks and dials and visible wiring to more elegant devices contained in wooden cabinets designed as furniture. This change made radio far more acceptable as family entertainment for the living room instead of a reclusive hobby for the attic.

Following this change, in 1926-27, radio manufacturers introduced sets that operated directly off the AC line, rather than off batteries. Many housewives of the era objected to the presence of batteries in their living rooms -- especially the wet-cell "A" batteries that could leak acid on the floor, create odors, or otherwise make their presence unpleasant. These batteries, likewise, would need to be carried off to a garage or filling station once a week or so to be recharged, adding to the inconvenience of owning a set. An AC set, on the other hand, could simply be plugged into the wall and enjoyed without any of this muss or fuss.

And the final such factor came in 1930, with the introduction of "midget" radios. These small table sets -- including the famous "cathedral" cabinets -- were much easier to fit into a living room than a massive console, and were also much more affordable for working-class people, who could buy one on credit for as little as fifty cents a week. These radios exploded onto the market during 1930, a period which coincided with the peak of A&A's popularity, and the two crazes thus were able to feed off each other -- more people could buy radios to listen to A&A, and more people who bought radios discovered they enjoyed A&A.

The popularity of "Amos 'n' Andy" did, however, undoubtedly drive the popularity of radio drama during the early 1930s, encouraging a great many imitators in the nightly serial format -- and soon spreading into daytime as well. While most dramatic programs prior to A&A had been anthologies, with few or no continuing characters, the popularity of "Amos 'n' Andy" proved beyond question that listeners would and could follow the stories of favorite characters and that Everyman characters such as they were could serve as the framework for long-term series popularity. Without the proletarian influence of Amos and Andy, the evolution and development of dramatic radio might have lagged for years in the sort of stilted, psuedo-stagey productions which characterized most American radio drama prior to their rise.

Her account echoes Elmo Elkins Caulkins's landmark 1927 Atlantic article, "Beauty the New Business Tool", which I discuss in Chapter Two of The Substance of Style. Caulkins wrote:

In applying art to machines we are on our own ground. Machines are native with us, and the effort to beautify them has created a new field of artistic endeavor, as witness the sky-scraper, the motor car, the phonograph and the radio....

Among our new playthings was the phonograph. For a long while it lingered in its ugly box with its blatant horn, and no one minded its hideousness in the strange new experience of listening to it. It did not occur to us that it was not necessary to affront the eye to please the ear. But the spur of competition compelled the manufacturers to add every improvement they could think of, and when mechanical improvements were exhausted they turned to aesthetic ones, with the result that the great horn disappeared inside, the case took on some semblance of form, designers and cabinetmakers were consulted and period and other designs produced, so that now the phonograph may easily be an addition to the furnishing and decoration of a room. The transformation of the radio took less time. While it is still so new that broadcasting stations have not yet been assigned permanent waves, its makers are as much concerned with giving it an acceptable physical appearance as with lengthening its reach. That is because it arrived in an age in which both manufacturer and consumer are aware that there is such a thing as good taste. We demand beauty with our utility, beauty with our amusement, beauty in the things with which we live. And so the radio has been promptly put in the hands of the designers, to make it, if possible, a thing of beauty and a joy forever even when silent or especially when silent.

And, to answer some of my emails in public, if you think the question about a 15 percent chance of $1,000,000 is a misprint or wrongly reported, it isn't. Those are the real results, and they're remarkably consistent. In fact, at 1% and 3% chances, essentially everyone went for the sure $500, with no distinguishable difference among groups.

If Bayesian spam filters are an indicator, a Bayesian approach is definitely the way to go. SpamSieve, a Bayesian filter for Mac OS X, has pretty much solved my spam problems.

And it now has its own blogging Carnival, with the second edition up here. They're looking for submissions for Carnival number three.

Speaking of "the future," check out Wayne Curtis's fun Atlantic piece on the Las Vegas monorail: "When I read that Las Vegas had opened a new monorail system last year to whisk travelers up and down the Strip, my first thought was, Of course: all cities of the future have monorails. My second thought was, When can I ride it?"

My friend didn't like my suggestion. After all, nobody reads the KJV anymore. Forget poetry (not to mention sensitivity to the underlying Hebrew), today's suburban Christianity is all about accessibility. It's been dumbed down.

Now I'm not a Christian, let alone an evangelical. If megachurches want to play bad-to-mediocre rock instead of great hymns, that's their business. But the spread of Christian pap does have spillovers, not the least of which is that devout Christian faith no longer brings with it a deep familiarity with what's actually in the Bible, as opposed to a few verses from the preacher's PowerPoint. Unless the person is over a certain age, Biblical literacy, when you do find it, rarely means acquaintance with great English. Forget theological or philosophical sophistication. I'd settle for the ability to comprehend complex sentences.

Throughout American history, Christian (largely Protestant) devotion has stretched people's minds and given them reason to think, if only within a closed system of belief. Religious practice has taught people to read, write, and speak. The rhythms and rhetoric of the Bible have given America its greatest political rhetoric, from Abraham Lincoln's to Martin Luther King's. Today's Christianity produces...George W. Bush.

Megachurch Christianity may hone organizational and business skills, but it isn't teaching believers to think about abstractions or communicate in higher than "everyday" language. No wonder megachurches combine their up-to-date media with fundamentalist doctrine. It fits well on PowerPoint--no paragraphs required. Leaving aside the validity of what they preach, today's most successful evangelicals are spreading pap.

While I'm ranting about the pap-ist threat, I should put in a few words about the mega-bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life. If anyone still used the phrase "begs the question" correctly, I would apply it here. While I'm sure the book inspires some people to more-fulfilling lives, Rick Warren's treatise is offensive in its audacious dodging of even the most sophomoric philosophical questions. (What about Hitler? Ted Bundy?) Just leafing through a few pages in Borders, I lost brain cells. Then I got mad. What a fraud, however honestly intended. Warren is amazingly featured (along with Al "Worst Speaker in the World" Gore) at this year's elite TED conference.

On a related note, John Lanius recently blogged on what his wife calls "Contemporary Christian Porn," and other forms of popular but debased evangelism.

Yes, all of the above could be considered an extended criticism of market-based competition. In the U.S., after all, religion is the freest market. But I'm not against the system; I'm all for it. As institutional responses to modern life, I find megachurches fascinating and productive. (I even had nice things to say about their architecture, which, while purely functional, is more interesting than its low-church Baptist predecessors.) But the most successful product is not necessarily the best on all dimensions--or on the ones I care about. And criticism is also part of the system.

Weeks is a grouchy guy--I'd be grouchy too if I had to be a book critic in Dallas--but this is the silliest attack on bloggers yet. Bloggers love books. Bloggers promote books. Bloggers write books. The InstaKing of bloggers is about to publish a book, An Army of Davids, that wouldn't even exist without blogging. Nope, blogging is Revenge of the Nerds, and nerds read books. They just may not read the same books that Jerome Weeks does.

As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging much lately. But I have read a bunch of interesting books, all worth sharing. Since the first of the year, I've read:

The Elusive Search for Growth by William Easterly, which combines a lucid intellectual history of the economics of growth with a sometimes heart-breaking account of how development policy has failed again and again, mostly by ignoring basic economic principles. Bono really needs to read it.

An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. My next book project will likely be an exploration of heterogeneity, working title Nobody's Normal, and Sacks tells stories of people on the extremes of human difference--to the point that they sometimes seem, even to themselves, like alien intelligences (hence the title of his book). He deserves his reputation as both a great writer and a humane scientist-physician.

Mindsight by Colin McGinn. I picked up McGinn's newer book The Power of Movies in December and, after reading it, realized that to understand glamour as an imaginative process, I need to delve a bit into the nature of imagination. I'm less interested than McGinn in parsing the differences between percepts and images, but I find his writing provocative and accessible. Plus he provides good bibliographies. I'm now rereading The Power of Movies.

Posted by Virginia at 12:13 PM | TrackBack

Project Runway exemplifies something I've noticed in covering design professions over the past few years: Design of all sorts, from the most engineering-oriented to the most "frivolous," is a redoubt of what Michael Barone calls "hard America". When Heidi Klum gathers a half dozen designers on the runway and tells them, "You represent the best and the worst," she isn't worrying about their feelings, or even their character, but about their work. Try talking like that to an English major or MBA student and watch your teaching ratings plummet.

As in life, however, the judgments aren't based only on one-dimensional notions of creativity or merit. What the client wants matters. Getting along with other designers matters (at least in some cases). Sometimes people survive a round just by being less bad, because they take fewer risks, than the competition. The process is basically fair, but the outcome doesn't always seem right--not a bad model for real life.

Here's the Amazon page for Michael Barone's book, Hard America, Soft America. The always superfantastic Manolo blogs regularly on Project Runway, with an archive here. I completely agree with his assessment of the latest challenge.

Eugene Volokh and Nick Gillespie blogged about "my" Starbucks cup back in November, but before I had a chance to see one myself, the season of the Red Cup descended on Starbucks. But the white cups are back, and I finally found one of mine. I had a little trouble, since when you actually look at a Starbucks cup it looks like this:

Starbucks went to a lot of trouble to solicit quotes from dozens of people. It designed and printed all these special cups. All the while forgetting that their cups come with a big brown cover right where the quotes go. Oops.

UPDATE: Just in case you might get the wrong idea from Dan Drezner, I didn't get paid for my Starbucks quote. Before I submitted it, however, they did send me a gift card for either $10 or $15 (I forget). I rarely drink Starbucks products--I live on Diet Coke--but it did cover some frappucinos for Professor Postrel.

People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, one who yearns to improve himself by reading Adam Smith on self-command (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and another who would rather watch an old movie on television. The two are in continual contest for control.

As a boy I saw a movie about Admiral Byrd's Antarctic expedition and was impressed that as a boy he had gone outdoors in shirtsleeves to toughen himself against the cold. I resolved to go to bed at night with one blanket too few. That decision to go to bed minus one blanket was made by a warm boy. Another boy awoke cold in the night, too cold to retrieve the blanket, cursing the boy who had removed the blanket and resolving to restore it tomorrow. But the next bedtime it was the warm boy again, dreaming of Antarctica, who got to make the decision. And he always did it again.

Aside from its personal charms, this passage is great because it isn't clear which little boy we should root for. Is it good self-discipline or foolish fantasy to leave off the blanket?

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.

That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes--anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

Read the whole thing (via Marginal Revolution).

Graham's point cuts against the zeitgeist. In today's NYT, David Brooks argues that, at least for those not blessed with a Y chromosome, errands are what matters most. His paean to domesticity as the highest and best use of women's time, and maybe even men's, does not conclude with an announcement that he's quitting the Times and PBS to spend more time with driving the kids around. (For those who hate Times Select, the column is on p. 8 of Week in Review.)

Taken together, these arguments address several old questions: Why, as Sir Francis Bacon asked, is it that the most important contributors to human progress have often been childless? Why did the rise of the 18th-century city, with its coffeehouses and abundance of servants, promote science, philosophy, and literature? And, of course, why have relatively few women made enduring contributions to fields that require single-minded devotion?

Quite simply: Somebody's got to do the errands of life. You can either do them yourself, hire someone to do them, or get a wife. Historically, the last has been the most common option.

Let me be clear: I do not believe there is One Best Way to live. I do not believe that the gracious life created by attending to small chores (including, but not only, those necessary to raise children) is inferior to one devoted to more focused pursuits. What I believe, and what you'll almost never see suggested by an establishment pundit, is that different people are suited to different sorts of lives and that both strategies have their downsides and their risks. (I wrote about one aspect of this topic--the politicization of parenthood--here.)

My New Year's resolution: Fewer errands, less sleep (I sleep a lot), more reading, more writing. Still to be determined: Is blogging an errand? For me at least, I suspect so. But perhaps I can find a way to manage it.

To help you keep those resolutions, take a look at my latest NYT column, which applies to New Year's resolutions some insights from Thomas Schelling's fascinating and important work on "self-command." I highly recommend his book Choice and Consequence. (Amazon is offering a discount for buying C&C along with Schelling's better-known The Strategy of Conflict.)

Back in 1992, Professor Postrel and his colleague Dick Rumelt published an article arguing that the problem of self-command helps explain why people voluntarily submit themselves to organizational hierarchy (even when capital investment is not an issue) rather than simply trading in markets. The full article isn't online, but a shorter version is here.