Link Banana

You know that symbol in email addresses that you don’t know the name of? The one that you always replace with “at”? Well, I’ve been saving two links about it:

• Bits tells a brief story of it’s move onto keyboards and into email:
  

  The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of” in records of transactions written by English merchants.

  That’s why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail.

• In the LRB, Daniel Soar tells a characteristically longer story, including this tidbit:
  

  This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem: in Korean it’s apparently a snail, in Danish an elephant’s trunk, in Turkish a ram, in Hungarian a maggot, in many Slavonic languages a monkey, apart from in Russian, where – inexplicably – it’s a dog.

If only to establish my present ignorance of current events, I was until today largely unaware of the widening problem of Gaza. One could trace the beginning to the complete Israeli blockade — as Sara Roy does — but the widely reported cause is an Israeli desire to lessen the rocket attacks.

I’ve always been curious about the operation of hedge funds, which are almost by nature obscure from public view. Donald MacKenzie’s piece in the last London Review offers a better primer than I’ve found elsewhere. For example, there’s this tidbit about the first hedge fund’s basic strategy:

By adding modest borrowing to, let’s say, $100,000 of investors’ money, Jones might buy $110,000 worth of the shares in companies he liked, while simultaneously short selling $40,000 of shares he thought might do badly. He was thus partially insulated (‘hedged’) against overall market movements. If the overall market fell, the shares he had bought (his ‘long positions’, in market terminology) would lose money, but his short positions would gain because buying back borrowed shares would now be cheaper.

I’m not sure why, but Naomi Klein — author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine — has always made me bristle. I think that Colby Cosh may have captured it:

Klein is basically a bored, restless adolescent who lacks the attention span to formulate a coherent political philosophy and has succeeded mostly by conveying to a young generation of wannabe radicals … that lack of rigour isn’t anything to be ashamed of in the groovy 21st century.

A more careful and thorough refutation of her “philosophy” can be found in this months-old critique from the London Review. The New Yorker story, which inspired Cosh to his analysis, is less critical but a worthy read.

(Cosh link via David Frum)

Without question the critical consensus is that with The Sopranos and The Wire off the air, Mad Men is the best thing around. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it myself, but I’m glad simply to read someone (at length) discuss the show without slavishly showing their good tastes by being a fan. Perhaps the best bit:

Whether one finds all of this claustrophobic and ludicrous or tightly wound and compelling depends very heavily on one’s opinion of Don Draper. Draper, as written, is a kind of social savant. He knows how to act in every emergency. He deploys strategic fits of temper to attain his ends. He’s catnip to women. As played by Jon Hamm, though, his manner hardly matches his activities. … Draper is supposed to have a deep secret, but it would make sense only if that secret were his weakness – fearfulness or femininity – instead of the show’s anticlimactic revelation that his mother was a whore and he picked up another man’s identity on the battlefield in Korea: bizarre Gothicisms that belong to some other series. One never sees hunger or anger in Hamm’s eyes, only the misery of the hunted fox. Either he is playing the hero as a schlub in deference to a 21st-century idea of masculinity as fundamentally hollow and sham, or he’s completely underequipped to convey male menace.

David Runciman’s exploration of America’s 2008 election is an engaging read. A few bits, however, stand out. On political blogs:

[A]lthough many of the blogs are hideous, rambling screeds, many are not, and a selection of the best will always produce plenty of wit and passion, along with unexpected insights.

On chronically inaccurate opinion polls:

This endless raft of educated opinion needs to be kept afloat on some data indicating that it matters what informed people say about politics, because it helps the voters to decide which way to jump. If you keep the polling sample sizes small enough, you can create the impression of a public willing to be moved by what other people are saying. That’s why the comment industry pays for this rubbish.

On how predictable the whole Democratic race has been:

The demographic determinism of this election campaign is evidence of the ease with which the main candidates have been able to exploit the instinctive reflexes of various segments of the population, and the difficulty that their opponents have had in overcoming these reflexes with competing arguments.

I rather enjoyed Terry Eagleton’s exploration of anonymity in literature for the London Review. He begins:

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace.

Also worth noting in that issue: Kevin Kopelson’s diary.

R.W. Johnson’s coverage of what’s happened in Zimbabwe over that last weeks is incredibly insightful and covers the all-but-unreported politics that have allowed Mugabe’s intransigence. His conclusion:

When such an elite [as the long-ruling Zanu-PF] feels its power threatened, it tends to fall back on its original self-definition as a national liberation movement. If one posits the problem in those terms then it follows that the defeat of an NLM can only mean the triumph of the forces of colonialism and apartheid which it came into existence to fight. In that view national liberation, once achieved, is the end of history. There can never be a point when it would be desirable for the gains of liberation to be lost, so the theory provides a watertight rationale – and a legitimating self-righteousness – for the ANC, Zanu-PF and the region’s other ruling NLMs to cling to power indefinitely. Seen this way the drama of Zimbabwe may indeed prefigure a more general crisis as these movements age and decay. We have seen enough of movements that believe they will remain to see the state wither away or to usher in a thousand-year Reich to know that bringing them to accept a less intransigent view of themselves is seldom a gentle business.