On deaccession: What should museums throw out?

Sunday links! May include Saturday links at no additional charge.

* Last night we saw the very nice Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul exhibit at the Met (on advice of AskMetaFilter) and then saw Apatow's Funny People. What I appreciated most about the Met exhibit is the "West of What?" attitude implicit in the presentation of the history of the Silk Road; what I appreciated least about Funny People were the thirty minutes of excess footage Apatow refused to cut. But I laughed

* How violence against women still doesn't register in our national consciousness —a must-read op-ed from Bob Herbert. I can't help thinking of "The Screwfly Solution" by James Tiptree, Jr. / Alice Sheldon, in which a (literal) plague of misogyny goes largely unchallenged because it is couched in the language of patriarchal religion.

* It's not a new story, but North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens and their subsequent staggeringly dishonest handling of the situation is truly stunning.

* "Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So." By Chalmers Johnson, via MeFi. The first of the ten steps is a nice example of the securitization rhetoric surrounding climate change, in which climate change is reframed as a national security issue and in the process depoliticized; today's New York Times approaches the issue in this way as well. The problem is that the struggle to protect the environment can't be depoliticized; in a finite world of limited resources there is no political question more basic than how we should distribute ecological costs. Securitization/depoliticization obscures the reality of the decision being made, to the benefit of the already privileged and the detriment of everybody else.

* More Mad Men teases from Salon and the New York Times.

* This Is the Only Level: a game.

A few more.

* Wikipedia is doomed. Doomed!

* Storage closets of the American Museum of Natural History. With awesome slideshow, via MeFi.

* Tim Morton makes the simple but necessary point that as the only sentient agents in the area—the only beings with "response ability"—we are "responsible" for climate change whether we are "causing" it or not.

* Biggest solar deal ever announced. The article goes on to say "When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely."

* Washington Monthly tries to suss out Judd Gregg's erratic behavior.

* Legalize it? The real question is why haven't we yet.

* And Krugman (via Ezra Klein) says we may just be screwed.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

Hooray for Mondays.

* Yesterday we went to New York to see After Nature at the New Museum and Rififi—the film that singlehandedly gave birth to the very idea of French film noir, according to a quote Ryan saw in the newspaper—at the Film Forum's French Crime Wave series. I officially pronounce both things Worth Doing™, with an extra-special deliciousness shout-out to Kate's Joint at 58 Avenue B in the East Village.

* Rest in peace, Isaac Hayes.

* YouTube video tribute to Jack Kirby, king of comics. Via MeFi.

* I've already made what I consider the definitive comment on election polling, but in case you need more I recommend Matthew Yglesias's post today on tracking polls:

Or maybe none of that happened. As everyone knows, there’s sampling error associated with polling. As a result, if you poll 1,000 people on August 1 and then you poll 1,000 different people on August 2 you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results differ by several percentage points even in the absence of any change in the underlying public opinion. Beyond that, doing one poll per day throughout a long campaign would mean that you’d expect to see one or two relatively rare outlier results per month even under circumstances of total stasis. And as Alan Abramowitz points out if you look at the daily results this is actually what you see — incredible volatility with Obama’s lead oscillating violently around an average of 3-4 points. Since it’s not plausible that the public mood is really swinging anywhere near as rapidly as a very naive reading of the Gallup daily results would suggest, people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race.

But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.

I'll only add that given the extent to which polls serve as a bulwark for functional democracy and accountable elections, the increasing sensationalization of polls as a means to drive news ratings rather than to reliably monitor public opinion is a very, very disturbing trend.

Polls should be boring. They should be so boring no one cares what they say.

* And Jesse Taylor has the best hypothetical history of the presidential primary I've seen:

Any number of things could have swayed the primary. But at the end of the day, Clinton apologizing for her Iraq vote (or just not having voted that way in the first place) would have guaranteed her the nomination. Or her running for Senate in Illinois.

I really think that's right. If she'd decided to run for Senate in Illinois rather than New York, she'd have had it.

I nearly took a job this summer working as the resident adviser and teaching assistant for the Duke in New York summer session; in the end it didn't work out for budgetary reasons, but I think it would have been fun. I only bring this up because Jaimee and I randomly bumped into the Duke in New York crew while we were walking through the Museum of Modern Art today, which means that whether I'd taken the job or not I would have been in that exact location at that exact time. More investigation is needed, but I assume it's fair to conclude that this incredibly minor coincidence holds true across all possible universes—no matter what, at 1:00 pm on June 16, 2007, that's where I am.

New York was fun, of course. The trouble with New York is that every time I visit I want to move there more, but every time Jaimee visits she wants to move there less. (And thus we are torn apart.) Today's highlight for me was surely the giant Dan Perjovschi installation in the central gallery of the MoMA, which through the magic of technology you can visit online. I'll try to put up some more images from the piece when I get back to Durham, but it's great fun.

After MoMA we also had time to visit the American Folk Art Museum, which has a couple of very cool pieces by Henry Darger, as well as some great political outsider art.

After that we hit Central Park for a free concert with some friends and a freak rainstorm that left us all soaked. When we got back to Jersey we met up with some of Jaimee's friends from high school for a meal at a quintessential Jersey diner that leaves me now questioning the wisdom of my decision to eat nothing but disgusting greasy food whenever I'm inside New Jersey.

So ends Bloomsday.