Pee-wee, RIP

His show was an antic blend of kid stuff and double entendre. Something for everyone in the family.

Summerfield, FL

Lithium and how everything is connected to everything

I recently bought eight settings of dishes from East Fork. It is beautiful, and they care about things I care about, and it will last... forever? Worth the money, on many levels, I think. Here was interesting news.

We’ve switched our glaze formula because our current glaze contains Petalite: a mineral that contains lithium. As the battery industry has grown they have started to buy up all minerals containing lithium. First the price for any material containing lithium exploded, then the supply chain dried up completely. The disappearance of this mineral forced us to quickly switch formulas.

Tony Bennett, RIP

I don't go gaga for Gaga, so Tony's late forays into duets left me a little underwhelmed, but then, he was still sounding pretty good well into his 90s... And in his prime, he was damn good.

Mass decarceration

Some amazingly good and important news... 

"One obvious consequence of these findings is that any contemporary claims suggesting that 1 in 3 Black men born today will be incarcerated in their lifetimes are no longer empirically tenable."

Krugman on motivated reasoning in economics

He's right about this, and the pattern extends well beyond positions on inflation. Consider the employment effects of the minimum wage, or the wage effects of immigration. Economists who study these issues tend to be on one team or the other, and their careful and "objective" empirical analysis will more often than not support their team's views. A challenge for anyone who wants to believe in technocracy.

This says something uncomfortable about the economics profession: We’re supposed to be doing dispassionate analysis, but the fact that most economists are consistently either inflation optimists or inflation pessimists whatever the circumstances suggests that somebody is suffering from motivated reasoning. (But not me. I, of course, am totally objective. OK, I do sometimes catch myself engaging in motivated reasoning. But I try to fight it.)

Authorial cruelty

John Banville seems to have found his calling as a writer of very literary yet can't-put-it-down crime novels. April in Spain is a very good one indeed, the best of his books I have read. It seems that everyone in Banville's Ireland has an appalling history of abuse and/or abandonment. Banville believes in morality, but whether one's tortured personal history leads to a life of sin or redemption seems a matter of chance, and the redeemed life is not one that offers consolations– to the contrary, God (Banville) is as content punishing the righteous as the evil. The problem is that Banville's eagerness to punish even his most admirable characters sometimes leads to plotting decisions that stretch credulity. What he does to Quirke by the end of this novel seems cruelly gratuitous and, perhaps for that reason, predictable. And predictability is one sin a crime novelist should avoid committing.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 102

From the inviting intro on tres, to the compulsively swinging percussion, to Ismael Quintana's vocals, to the awesome big-band horn arrangements, to the master's solo, channeling a little McCoy Tyner. 50 years old this year, and sounding better than the day it was born... Wow.