Thursday night, how I love you.

* Jason Zengerle at the Plank undertakes a much more full-throated defense of Letterman than the one I offered last night, reminding us about Bristol Palin's recent publicity tour (which I guess I'd blocked out) and questioning the logic of the Palins making their own joke about their daughter being assaulted. For what it's worth, I still think the joke was borderline and shouldn't have been told, but it was plainly not about the fourteen-year-old.

* The headline reads: 'Tiny chance' of planet collision.

* Game theory and Batman villains. Isn't it well-established by now that the Joker would never kill Batman?

* New element added to the periodic table. Canavanium?

The Sarah Palin pick has crystalized what I'll throw up here as my Boldest Prediction Ever: the next elected president of the United States, after Obama, will be a woman. Hillary Clinton exposed not only the potential political advantages of a female candidate—a surprising reversal of historical trends that she simply failed to capitalize on early enough—but also a palpable hunger that the "highest, hardest glass ceiling" be broken. And Palin's selection proves that this hunger extends even across the aisle.

We can't know right now, of course, but from where I'm sitting it seems likely that the next totally open election will take place in 2016, when Barack Obama steps down after his second term and presumably-still-VP Joe Biden (being just a few months older than John McCain is now) will be too old. I'd actually take odds, if that does come to pass, that both parties run women at the top of the ticket in 2016. In game theoretical terms there's just too much net potential advantage to be lost in allowing the opposing party to run a woman while you run a man. That hunger won't be getting any smaller in eight more years of waiting.

I hope I'm right. It'll be a very good day for America, and a better day still if she's a Democrat.

Game theory in The Dark Knight. Fun article analyzing the Joker's opening heist in the context of the pirate game, an interesting situation with a nicely counter-intuitive result:

Three pirates (A, B, and C) arrive from a lucrative voyage with 100 pieces of gold. They will split up the money according to an ancient code dependent on their leadership rules. The pirates are organized with a strict leadership structure—pirate A is stronger than pirate B who is stronger than pirate C.

The voting process is a series of proposals with a lethal twist. Here are the rules:

1. The strongest pirate offers a split of the gold. An example would be: “0 to me, 10 to B, and 90 to C.”
2. All of the pirates, including the proposer, vote on whether to accept the split. The proposer holds the casting vote in the case of a tie.
3. If the pirates agree to the split, it happens.
4. Otherwise, the pirate who proposed the plan gets thrown overboard from the ship and perishes.
5. The next strongest pirate takes over and then offers a split of the money. The process is repeated until a proposal is accepted.

Pirates care first and foremost about living, then about getting gold. How does the game play out?

If everyone acts maximally rationally, A comes away with 99 of the 100 coins, which is pretty fantastically unexpected.

Internet Tuesday!

* Parsippany, NJ, is looking to put up red light cameras that know you only came to a rolling stop before turning right on red. Dystopia is now.

* Are we already nostalgic for the Bush era? Salon investigates using the leaked trailer for Oliver Stone's W as its source text.

* Via Boing Boing, Crooked Timber has a pretty good piece up about the vacuity of the commonplace rhetoric that "managers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize corporate profits." It turns out, of course, that this duty actually refers to nothing in particular and can be used to justify any action.

So we’re left with “maximise the present value of future profits”, or maximise the intrinsic value of the company, which is already a bit of a problem because our maximand is now an intrinsically unobservable quantity, which reasonable people can differ wildly in their subjective assessment of. But even if we grant a massive epistemological free lunch and pretend that managers have a set of reliable conditional forecasts of the consequences of different courses of action, we’re still surprisingly far from a workable decision rule.

The reason is that all the paradoxes of choice theory which arise at the individual level are still there when you try to impose a maximisation rule for corporate decisions. For example, it can’t possibly be the case that we want an interpretation of “maximise the value of the shareholders’ equity” to mean that corporate managers have a fiduciary duty to play the (Defect) strategy in a business situation analogous to a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Or for that matter to be two-boxers in a business situation analogous to Newcomb’s Problem (such situations are incredibly common, as the kind of deals you are offered are very definitely related to people’s assessment of whether you’re the kind of guy who grabs every nickel he sees). Economists can ignore these problems and paradoxes in choice theory with a shrug of the shoulders, a mutter of “oh ordinary people, will you never learn” and a few quid for the Experimental Economics lab. But fiduciary duties are important things, so if we’re going to make our maximisation criterion into a fiduciary duty, then we have to interpret it in a way which allows for strategic behaviour.

* And the Pinocchio Theory has a similarly good post on capitalism, consumerism, and waste.

We are forced, as Karatani says, to buy back as consumers the very goods that we initially created as producers, and that were taken away from us. This “alienation” is the reason why my subjective jouissance as a consumer has nothing to do with my objectified toil as a producer. I do not consume in the same way that I produce. Even the money that I spend wastefully and gleefully, as a consumer, on (as Deleuze and Guattari say) “an imposed range of products (’which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’)” seems utterly disconnected from the money that I earn painfully in wages or salary — despite the fact that it is, of course, exactly the “same” money. It is only, and precisely, in such a climate of disconnection that “acts of consumption” can be exalted as our only possible “expressions of freedom.” Or, as Graeber puts it, “rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely `free’ because others are absolutely unfree,” as was the case under slavery, in consumer capitalism “we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions over the course of the week and working day.”

* Corrections to Last Month's Letters to Penthouse Forum.

* List of fictional films from Seinfeld.

* And, via Neilalien, an in-depth investigation of why Star Trek: The Next Generation should actually be understood as a creative failure, in two parts. This sums it up pretty much exactly—like all huge nerds of a particular age I remember the show rather fondly, but it's no accident that it's been fifteen years since I watched an episode. And the point about "alternate universe" episodes is especially well-taken:

"Best of Both Worlds" has only one real rival for the title of "best TNG episode": "All Good Things". It's one of the best -- if not, hell, the best series finale I've ever seen. It summed up, in two hours, everything that was good about the show, as well as putting much of the preceding seven years to shame in terms of showcasing interesting, well-written, dynamic and downright awesome sci-fi writing. It deals with alternate realities -- TNG was always good when it dealt with alternate realities, probably because they could get away with the illusion of consequence in alternate realities where things could actually "happen", at least sort-of. Most importantly, watching "All Good Things", the viewer can fool themselves into thinking that there really was an alternate-universe TNG where all that cool character development and sharp writing came together every week, and not just a handful of times over the course of 178 freakin' episodes. But of course, since it was the last episode, they probably thought they could get away with actually changing things up a bit. A shame, that.

I liked "Parallels" and "The Inner Light", two more alternate-reality episodes that actually seemed to cut to the heart of the respective spotlight characters -- Worf, in a rare non-Klingon-centric starring role, and Picard himself. Again, though, in order to find something interesting to say about the characters, the writers had to go out of their way to concoct Rube Goldberg plot machines that would allow for emotional arcs without messing with the precious status quo. If you start looking, you can find a lot of episodes that go to the same well: there's always something to trigger or mitigate unusual behavior, something to excuse the characters from acting like real people as soon as they put on those damn Starfleet unitards.

Even now you see Heroes doing the same sort of thing with their repetitive "Bad Future" arcs, which give the illusion of plot rather than plot itself.

Everyone is getting all political over Dark Knight.

* Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal finds the movie a grand apologia for Bush:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

* But Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias want to trouble this understanding, where Matt makes what I thought was an interesting point about the leap from comic to film:

Shifting a bit away from the issues of the day, though, one interesting thing about the film is what a difference it makes to rip Batman out of the context of the broader DC universe. The DCU's other anchor character, Superman, is far more powerful than Batman. And of course Superman's hardly alone in this regard -- Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, etc. all wield vast power and even lesser lights like the Flash outpace Batman by far.

In that context, Batman rather uniquely doesn't suffer from a substantial legitimacy problem. You don't look at Batman and say "no man should wield this much power" in a world where Superman can see through walls. It's those other guys who have legitimacy problems and Batman is one of the important checks on them -- especially on Superman, who specifically entrusts a kryptonite ring to Batman for that purpose.

* But it's Kugelmass who has probably the best review I've seen thus far.

The reverse is also true, though—The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other—I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people—Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

* And for the fanboys in the audience, via Jacob, 8 great villains we want in the next Batman movie.

I went to grad school during the last days of theory. We started out in our first years with Derrida seminars and ended scrambling to become textual materialists. It became gauche (!), by the end, to go on about Lacan or Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze. But I also got my first tenure track job in the years of the "war on terror." True to form, true to my academic generation, I am a leftist who apologizes for mentioning Iraq in passing during my classes on Conrad, and who probably advances better critiques of Marx than appreciations of him. Such was the ideological weather on the day I was born to the professoriate - and it's grown to feel like the way the weather is supposed to be, has always been. There are times when I can tell that the students don't want me to pull my punches, but I inevitably do.

C.R. at Long Sunday has a long and very interesting post tracking the latest enrollment crisis in English departments against the decline of theory and the depoliticized classroom. (The same post is cross-posted here.) Is theory due for a big comeback? That would certainly be excellent news for those of us in radical-left-wing theory-heavy interdisciplinary graduate programs who even in these benighted days still spend significantly more time on Althusser and Lacan than Herman Melville or Jane Austin.

I feel the same impulse to pull one's punches as C.R., sometimes, but there's pulling one's punches and then there's pulling one's punches. I don't see it as my mission to evangelize to my students, and I (hope I) don't—but treating college students as if they need to be hermetically sealed off from all politics, as if these issues aren't in fact the air that they (and we all) breathe, is decidedly deluded. The classroom—especially the humanities seminar—should be the space where political and ideological issues can be brought out, problematized, and wrestled with; it's the space in which, among other things, students learn how to ask the questions they already have and where to start looking for the answers.

I don't see any reason at all to apologize for mentioning Iraq during the study of Conrad, as C.R. says he does; in fact it's rather hard for me to imagine how you'd be able to read and discuss Conrad in 2008 without saying the word "Iraq" and I don't see why you'd want to. These are college students, not children; it does everybody involved a disservice to pretend that we're all just in it for the aesthetics.

It's true that the purpose of academic study of literature and culture is not and should never have been about building new leftists. But encouraging people to think critically about the world in which they live will, fairly inevitably, encourage students towards a more leftist politics, as it always has—and there's no reason for us to shirk from that.

The article to which C.R. is responding, William Deresiewicz's review of Professing Literature in The Nation, also has some rather interesting observations (if often wrong-headed, for the reasons C.R. describes) on the state of the discipline, mostly tied to the MLA Job List. The key points come to two or three sentences:

The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.... In other words, the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.

This doesn't really strike me as such a bad thing, despite Deresiewicz's negative spin; isn't it high time the profession acknowledge that it mostly traffics in what interests teenagers, that it always has, and moreover that it needs to do so in order to survive in the college marketplace at all?

Teenagers are our business, like it or not. They're our bread and butter.

This bit, however, is much more disturbing:

Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Where were all these people when I was applying? I put all my chips on grad school. Now I'm sunk.

The Traveler's Dilemma, second cousin of the Prisoner's Dilemma, sheds light on the meta-rational rejection of rationality that characterizes so much of human relations.

On a related note, it isn't easy to outwit Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp." Wikipedia will get you started.

If you need to make a mix tape and you don't have time to rewatch High Fidelity, Esquire has your cheat sheet. Via blucarbnpinwheel.

Ten Species of Charismatic Megafauna That May Go Extinct in the Next Ten Years.