The Late Stephen Colbert

If Colbert’s interviews—meta-interviews, really—tend to be a little edgier, a little more unpredictable, than either Stewart’s or Letterman’s, one can’t help assuming that it’s because they are conducted by The Character, not the everyday husband and father. What will happen when the interviewer is Stephen Colbert, not “Stephen Colbert”? If an E! Online compilation of Colbert-as-Colbert is any guide, he’ll be charming, intelligent, and amusing. But the hint of lethality, if not altogether gone, is likely to be attenuated. The Character hasn’t had to worry about being likeable, any more than Elmer Fudd did. He’s been free to go places that an actual person can’t. The Character’s very one-dimensionality has given his interviews an interestingly three-dimensional quality.

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An unfortunate atmosphere of reverence surrounds these legacy late-night TV jobs, as if Carson, Letterman, Paar and the rest were Popes, or even saints. The shows are encrusted with tradition and ritual. Compared to what Stewart and Colbert have wrought on Comedy Central, the offerings on the old three-letter networks, no matter how many Jimmys they’re fronted by, feel tired.

Stewart will now have to soldier on alone. The immediate loss is for liberals, for whom “Stephen Colbert” has played a unique role as a fifth column. The Character has been a miraculous and unparalleled intellectual and political achievement, sustained for a very long time at a very high level. But if the intelligence, discipline, and hard work that Colbert invested in The Character can be brought to bear on revitalizing the variety show, then the polity’s loss may turn out to be the culture’s gain. If Colbert can truly reinvent the genre, if he has the freedom and the inclination to blow it up and build on the rubble, then perhaps The Character will not have died in vain. For the moment, though, excuse me while I put on my black armband.
 

Hendrik Hertzberg on Stephen Colbert's shift to Late Night to take over for David Letterman. I'm late on this one, but I have to agree with Hertzberg that I'm saddened to lose Colbert the Character.

I understand the financial appeal of the late night circuit, and I'm happy for Colbert getting to cash in on his amazing run but culturally the late night talk shows are a wasteland, more and more irrelevant by the day in this new age of media. Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel grasp to produce a bit of cultural residue by coming up with sketches (like this or this) that will play well on YouTube for days after they've aired.

Ironically, in doing so they were chasing in the footsteps of Colbert and Jon Stewart. Now the court jester is trading in his clown shoes for the royal robe. I fear I'll miss the days when he was pointing out the emperor had no clothes.

Well, we'll always have Colbert's hosting set at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, still one of the bravest comedy routines ever.

Discharge thy secret!

When it came time to adapt Frozen, the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, for foreign markets, Disney made the odd selection of Modern Standard Arabic over the more commonly used dialect of Egyptian Arabic, which previous Disney films had been dubbed into.

It’s tricky to describe the quality of a literary text in a formal language to a speaker of American English or any other language that does not contain the same range of linguistic variety as diglossic language families like Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. One way to put it is that Modern Standard Arabic is even less similar to regional Arabic dialects than the English of the King James Bible is to the patter of an ESPN sportscaster.

The Arabic lyrics to “Let It Go” are as forbidding as Elsa’s ice palace. The Egyptian singer Nesma Mahgoub, in the song’s chorus, sings, “Discharge thy secret! I shall not bear the torment!” and “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” From one song to the next, there isn’t a declensional ending dropped or an antique expression avoided, whether it is sung by adancing snowman or a choir of forest trolls. The Arabic of “Frozen” is frozen in time, as “localized” to contemporary Middle Eastern youth culture as Latin quatrains in French rap.

Why Disney decided to abandon dialectal Arabic for “Frozen” is perplexing, and the reaction has been mixed. Many YouTube viewers are annoyed, with some fans recording their own versions of the songs in dialect. An online petition has called for Disney to switch its dubbing back to Egyptian Arabic, plaintively wondering, “How can we watch ‘Monsters University’ in the Heavy Modern Arabic while we saw the first one in Egyptian accent that everybody loved…?”
 

The subtitled video is a hoot.

Bait bikes

Officer Matt Friedman fights crime with modern tools: Twitter, which he uses to publicize pictures of suspects and convicted criminals, and a GPS device, which he uses to track down stolen property.

In both cases, his lure is stolen bicycles — including the “bait bikes” that have recently been seeded throughout the city to tempt potential thieves. Equipped with GPS technology, the bicycles, which exist to be stolen, can be tracked down in real time and the thieves can be arrested. Then their photographs are posted to Twitter from the handle @SFPDBikeTheft. The bait bikes are of high value, to ensure that people caught taking them are charged with a felony.

Recently, for example, a thief took a $1,500 bicycle from outside a train stop and pedaled off into the sunset. But 30 minutes later, Officer Friedman and his team, having tracked the bike, converged on the rider at a park.

“You should have seen his face — he thought he was in the clear,” said Officer Friedman, 41, who carries a .40-caliber Sig Sauer semiautomatic and an iPhone 5, which he used that day to take a picture of the severed bike lock. He then posted an image on Twitter with the message: Thank You 4 Taking Our Bait Bike.
 

I hadn't heard of this new tactic before. As someone who had three bikes stolen while an undergrad, my instinct is to embrace any and all measures to fight bike crime, including the public shaming. As noted in the article, the University of Wisconsin, Madison saw a 40% drop in reported bike thefts the first year they rolled out a bait bike program.

However, the social cost here is fuzzier. As educator Zeynep Tufekci writes:

If you are still fuming at the memory of a bike being stolen (I am, even now) and wondering why these thieves should not get charged with felonies, ponder for a moment. [Added: an add other minor or major infractions for the next example: it’s not a perfect example.] Have you ever rolled through a stop sign? Have you failed to perfectly stop, ever? Rolling through stop signs puts people’s lives at risk and is done just as intentionally as stealing a bike. It’s more dangerous and destructive than stealing a bike. [Though it’s been pointed out by people who understand the laws better than I do that our criminal code does not view that as the same kind of intention as bike stealing. I don’t claim to be making a legal argument, but just trying to push our imagination politically.]

Sure, there is a cost to bike theft, and it is a problem. But there is also cost to rendering large numbers of people unemployable through felony convictions.

Now imagine a city in which areas in which tech workers lives were equipped with cameras that caught everyone who ever rolled through a stop sign. You got a felony charge, since the evidence was indisputable. You lost your job, and could never work in the same sector again. You can’t vote either. Maybe you have probation. Your life is ruined, forever, and fairly irrecoverably.
 

Officer Friedman, mentioned in the excerpt above, responded to charges of the program being a form of entrapment by noting that bait bikes

...are not simply left out unlocked for opportunistic types. (Unlike SFPD's reality TV-ready Bait Car program that was quickly halted a few years back.) They are locked up and then swiped by thieves with the tools to do so and the know-how to unload them. Like this recidivist on the street with an angle grinder, or these guys running a chop shop on 13th Street, or a notorious bike thieves in the East Bay.
 

If my bike were recovered through such a program, I'd just be happy to get it back. Having the thief charged with a felony would be unnecessarily harsh.

Perhaps technology will offer alternative solutions in the future. The cost of small tracking devices is coming down. Many crowdfunding projects are for little tracking tags or gizmos that you can attach to or put in your valuables to be able to detect their location on your phone. The problem is that most operate on Bluetooth and have limited range and battery life, but perhaps those problems can be overcome. In that world, theft might be less prevalent because of the increased difficulty of hiding the object.

One might argue that a bike thief could come up with electronic countermeasures to combat tracking devices, but most bike thieves are looking to unload bikes as soon as possible and not seeking to maximize their cash return on each component or the entire bike itself. The cost of countermeasures might not be worth the investment given the low cash return on each stolen bike.

Miscellany

1. High frequency trading, betting on tennis edition. Given that in tennis the gap in the number of points won between the winner and the loser is often quite low, the difference of knowing who one a particular game can often swing the result expectations from one side to the other, opening up quick and short-lived arbitrage windows.
2. Lance Stephenson, basketball buffoon. “Back when he was in high school, Stephenson appeared in a documentary directed by Adam Yauch, of the Beastie Boys, which centered on a pickup game between eight young basketball phenoms at Rucker Park, in Harlem. Joshua Hersh wrote about Stephenson’s role in the film for The New Yorker: “Stephenson appears to be having a lot of fun, throwing down slam dunks, and even, at one point, dancing a little jig. In the fourth quarter, muscling his way to a rebound, he smacks Love”—Kevin Love, then a player for U.C.L.A.—“in the face with his forearm, busting open his lip.”” This was prescient given Stephenson's slap of Norris Cole in the Heat's series-clinching victory the other day. I like the term “basketball buffoon.”
3. The ideological Turing Test. “The Ideological Turing Test is a concept invented by American economist Bryan Caplan to test whether a political or ideological partisan correctly understands the arguments of his or her intellectual adversaries: the partisan is invited to answer questions or write an essay posing as his opposite number. If neutral judges cannot tell the difference between the partisan’s answers and the answers of the opposite number, the candidate is judged to correctly understand the opposing side.”
4. Is it time to abolish the 7-day week? It is somewhat arbitrary, but I think the author minimizes the value of coordination in the knowledge economy. The tech world has already hacked the 7-day work week quite a bit. Many developers are nocturnal and work on a different cycle than other job functions.
5. Selfish Play Increases during High-Stakes NBA Games and Is Rewarded with More Lucrative Contracts. This isn't meant to be another veiled reference to Lance Stephenson, though I wouldn't blame you for thinking it was. There's no “I” in “team,” but there is in “raise.” One of the reasons basketball is one of the hardest sports to quantitatively assess player value in is that an individual's statistical performance doesn't always correlate to the team's performance. That's much less true in a sport like baseball which is much more of a series of discrete individual confrontations.
6. Virgin Atlantic reaches deal with US FAA on launching flights into space from New Mexico; first flight expected by end of 2014. Let's hope the Virgin Atlantic website is better than the Virgin America website. I'm not sure I can deal with the first world privilege that will be tweets from gazillionaires complaining they couldn't log on to purchase a space flight.

A.I.

This might be a reach, but I’ve come to think of A.I. as Spielberg “getting rid of his toys.” The movie slips in sly visual and thematic references to past Spielberg blockbusters: There’s an E.T. moon hanging in the background of more than one scene, multiple Close Encounters silhouettes, and a Jurassic Park-like debate about the moral responsibilities of scientists. Also, at one point, David listens to Monica read a story to Martin while partially blocking a piece of art so only the words “because I could” are visible—another callback to Jurassic Park, perhaps. Spielberg made several “mature” films before A.I., but this one at times seems almost like a direct indictment of his earlier inclinations toward juvenilia.
 

Noel Murray with a lovely essay on A.I. 

A.I. in particular still strikes me as a masterpiece. I thought it might be back in 2001; now I’m certain of it. But it isn’t any easier to watch in 2014 than it was before my first child was born. Like a lot of Spielberg’s films—even the earlier crowd-pleasers—A.I. is a pointed critique of human selfishness, and our tendency to assert our will and make bold, world-changing moves, with only passing regard for the long-term consequences. Spielberg carries this theme of misguided self-absorption to child-rearing, implying that parents program their kids to be cute love machines, unable to cope with the harshness of the real world. He also questions whether humankind is nothing but flesh-based technology, which emerged from the primordial ooze (represented in the opening shot of A.I. by a roiling ocean), and has been trained over millennia to respond to stimuli in socially appropriate ways. A.I. blurs the lines between human and mecha frequently, from an early shot of Monica that makes her look exactly like one of Professor Hobby’s creations, to the way Martin walks, thanks to mechanical legs.

This notion of humans as machines resonates with me because my son is on the autistic spectrum. We had no idea back when we watched A.I.in 2001 that part of our parenting duties would one day involve making our child understand what certain facial expressions mean. Privately, my wife and I call our son “Robot Boy,” referencing both a Guided By Voices song and A.I. But I’m not sure that raising an autistic child makes us any more attuned than most mothers and fathers to how much parenting is like programming—and how inadequate that programming can be. It’s brutal to watch A.I. and see Monica feed fairy tales to David before cutting him loose with a feeble, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world.” It’s even more painful to know that if David needs a model for what life might be like on his own, he can look to Teddy, who’s self-sufficient, but lonely. The harshest lesson of A.I.—and one Spielberg doesn’t flinch from—is that inevitably, the Davids and Teddys are left to fend for themselves, armed with whatever half-considered advice and parables adults have thrown at them over the years. And that’s the hell of it.