The Economics of Smaug What’s the real lesson of The Hobbit?

The Economics of Smaug

What’s the real lesson of The Hobbit?

Jan 3 2013

Photo

Someone told me you aren’t listening to enough Frank Turner.

Dec 29 2012

Video

roseisrose: My wife and I have been reading to our daughter Rose since she was first born, on May 19, 2009.  She’s now 3 1/2.  She was born deaf so for the first nine months of her life reading had limited effectiveness. Still, she enjoyed sitting with us and looking at books, so we read to her during the day and, importantly, every night at bed time. At 9 months Rose was implanted with Cochlear bionic hearing devices.  Reading became a huge part of training Rose to listen to the world and to human voices.  Since she had gone the first nine-months of her life without sound, it was very important to train her to listen well for the first time.  We began with Bill Martin and Eric Carle’s Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? Obviously this had a thematic relevance to us.  The first sound I remember hearing Rose imitate was my impression of an elephant trumpeting.  It was a real triumph.  In those early days we also read a lot of Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown and Mother Goose nursery rhymes.  Dr. Suess was added later, starting with the The Ear Book, The Foot Book, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You.  Also Big Dog, Little Dog and Go Dog Go. We noticed early on that Rose had an aptitude for memorizing her books.  We encouraged this by pausing while reading and letting her remember what came next.  This was made relatively easy by the pictures in the books.  It’s easier to remember what the Very Hungry Catepillar eats each day because there are pictures of it.  But Rose also showed that she could memorize nursery rhymes easily, even when the pictures didn’t necessarily tip you off about what the words were. The biggest surprise came the summer after Rose turned two, when we began reading The Little Engine That Could, which was the first book delivered to us by the Dolly Parton charity book service.  Rose loved this book and we read it over and over again.  She insisted that we leave the book in her bed with her so she could look at it at night.  This resulted in tears more than once when she accidentally ripped the pages, which were thin paper pages rather than the board books she had mostly held earlier.  One night we heard her in her room talking. But she wasn’t really talking. She was reciting the book.  She knew every single phrase, every single word.  It was an amazing discovery.  Our daughter, born deaf, and obviously unable to read at the age of 2, had listened to the words closely enough that she was able to commit all of them to memory.  In fact, she would insist that she be the one who “read” the book at bed time. Around this time we bought Rose a few Thomas the Tank Engine books ext because she like the Little Engine book so much. Both feature little blue engines.  The first one was “Crack in the Track” followed by “Trains, Cranes, & Troublesome Trucks,” “Go Train Go!” and “Stop Train Stop!” She quickly memorized these books as well.  She fell in love with trains at this time.  We bought her some engines to play with, and some track sets. This year for Christmas she said that her greatest wish was for “more train tracks.”  (Also, her favorite color became blue. When we painted her room, that’s what color she wanted.) Other books we were reading to Rose between two and three were the Suessians: Hand Hand Fingers Thumb, A Fish Out of Water, Green Eggs and Ham, Wacky Wednesday, and There’s A Wocket in My Pocket.  I also picked up two or three (and later more) Frog and Toad books, which were a big hit with Rose.  She memorized quite a few of these stories.  I came across a collection of Beatrix Potter stories at a stoop sale in Brooklyn and began to read them to Rose.  She loved the little rabbits so much, although she was a bit afraid of Mr. McGregor.  I think this might have been her first encounter with a “villain.” She had lots of questions about the villains. She wanted to know why Mrs. McGregor put Benjamin’s father into a pie.  We decided to answer her straightforward: because she wanted to eat the rabbit.  She wanted to know why Mr. McGregor wouldn’t share his garden with the rabbits.  Why did Benjamin and Peter insist on going to the garden despite the danger?  There were lots and lots of questions each night. Rose shortly memorized the Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and the Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  Every word on every page, knowing exactly when to turn the pages. She nick-named herself Flopsy, I became Peter, her mother Mrs. Rabbit, her nanny Mopsy.  Her unborn sister, for whom her mother and I had not yet settled on a name, was Cottontail. Rose began a habit of sleeping with these books in her bed every night, a habit that continues today.  You can often hear her at night in her room reciting these books.    As you can probably tell, we have a lot of books in our lives.  We read two stories every night, one story on the floor by her bed and another in bed.  Reading is one of Rose’s favorite past times so we read a lot outside of official story time also.  I couldn’t list all of the books if I tried but some of the notable titles that became favorites of Rose included: Leo Lionni’s The Biggest House in the World, The Alphabet Tree, little blue and little yellow; Swimmy; The Big Orange Slot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Eric Carle’s Papa Please Get the Moon For Me, The Grouchy Lady Bug, The Very Lonely Firefly, and the Very Hungry Catepillar; too many Sandra Boynton books to count, but especially Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaur, Pajama Time, Snuggle Puppy, Hippos Go Berserk, and Night, Night Little Pooki; and Nancy WHite Carlstrom’s Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? Sometime around Rose’s third birthday I picked up a series of books about Quakers in Nantucket that center around a little boy named Obadiah.   It became obvious reading these to Rose that she was becoming very interested in the plots and characters.  In retrospect, we realized that this was one of the reasons she really loved the Peter Rabbit books.  They had many characters with many motivations, and the lead characters were flawed, troublesome youngsters.  They took place in new, and exotic settings (or at least, settings that were exotic to a Brooklyn raised three year old).  And the plots were somewhat suspenseful.  Would Peter get caught? Would Obadiah win the race with his sister Rachel?  By the way, these elements also made them very fun for adults to read.  You can only read so many sweet rhyming books, or even silly rhyming books, before your eyes glaze over a bit.  Stories with characters, settings, plots and surprise really shine after a few years of rhymes and simpler stories.  (Not to knock those too hard; I recommend every single book I’ve named above—with the exception perhaps of the Thomas books, which are too simple for my tastes.) Around this time our daughter began to sing with her nanny a lot more.  Her first nanny had shown her a few songs from Sesame Street on YouTube, including Feist singing “One Two Three Four” and Elmo singing the Alphabet song.  Her next nanny began playing some more grownup fair, including Judy Garland singing “I Was Born In Michigan” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”  Rose knew these songs by heart. Now Rose had long had a set of finger puppets of characters from the Wizard of Oz.  The nanny taught Rose about the characters by playing their songs on YouTube.  Rose grew fascinated with them.  I eventually showed her the scene of the Wicked Witch of the West melting, something that frightened her not at all.  At some point, a few months after Rose was 3 years old, my wife watched the entire film with Rose on a rainy day when I was out of town.  Rose was enthralled with Dorothy and her friends.  In her mind, she went from being Flopsy to being Dorothy. I decided to buy a copy of the L. Frank Baum novel that was the basis of the movie.  I had never read the book but had always been curious about it.  I picked up the 100th Anniversary edition, which is a facsimile of the 1900 first edition, including 24 full-color plates and 130 two-color illustrations. Now this book is over 200 pages long, spread out over 24 chapters.  Attempting to read such a thing to a three-year old was at least a little bit crazy.  All the experts in reading say you do not really introduce children to chapter books until much later, and even then they should be much, much shorter—100 pages at the most.  I had no right to expect Rose to have the attention span to follow pages crammed with this many words, much less a story that went on for so long.  At two chapters a night, it would take us nearly two weeks to finish the book. Nights I had to work late would test her attention span because the period in which she had to keep the story in her mind would stretch out even longer.  Looking back on it now, I think it was not only foolish but a bit selfish to read this book to her so early.  Was I really reading it for her or because I wanted to read it? Perhaps because she already knew some of the story and identified so strongly with Dorothy, she was engaged immediately.  Her attention span never wavered.  She had lots of questions, many about the difference between the film and book.  The good witch who meets Dorothy in Munchkinland is not named Glinda, is not from the South, is not young, and is not pretty.  The magical shoes are silver instead of ruby red.  Nobody sings. We didn’t end up reading the book every night.  I was working late a lot at this time, so I read Wizard of Oz only a few nights during the week.  My wife read other stories on nights I wasn’t home.  This meant it took nearly a month to read the entire book.  Rose never seemed to lose interest or lose track of what was happening in the plot.  She followed right along.  The finger puppets seemed to help. She would act out the scenes with her puppets.  This was so adorable we eventually upgraded her to rag dolls that were much larger—and less easily misplaced—than the finger puppets. As soon as we were done with book, with Dorothy safely returned to Kansas, Rose wanted to read it again.  I was a bit wary about my own patience for reading a full-length novel twice in row.  But the second time around I got better.  I invented special voices for each of the characters: a soft, child like voice for Dorothy; a robot-like voice for the Tin Man; a growl for the Lion; a goofy, simpleton voice for Scarecrow.  Rose really loved the book the second time through it, which meant we were in for a third reading. Her younger sister—formerly known as Cottontail and now known as Madeline—was born in early October. Rose had no doubt what she was going to be for Halloween.  She was Dorothy. Madeline was Toto.  I was the Tin Man.  My wife was the Scarecrow.  As we walked around Park Slope Halloween night, trick-or-treating at the local shops on 7th Avenue, Rose would point out the witches.  “Look, Daddy, another witch!” A friend asked if Rose was scared of the witches.  So I asked her. “No, Daddy. I’m not afraid of the witches. They’re afraid of me. Because I’m going to melt them,” she said. As amazed as I was that Rose had the attention span to listen to such a long book, I began to dread the prospect of reading it a fourth or a fifth time.  I also worried.  Was it healthy to read the same book this many times? Rose often talked to the witch alone in her bedroom, arguing over the shoes and threatening to melt her.  It’s a bit creepy to hear a toddler talking to an imaginary witch.  Isn’t that how those demonic possession movies start?  Rose wore her Dorothy costume around the house quite often.  I bought a couple of other big books in an attempt to turn her away from the Wizard of Oz.  I started with the sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is called The Marvelous Land of Oz. It follows the further adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in Oz.  Rose lasted a few chapters before growing restless. She wanted to know where Dorothy was.  She wasn’t interested in the main character, an adolescent boy named Tip. So I bought Alice in Wonderland.  It featured a young girl chasing a bunny into another world! Sort of Dorothy meets Peter Rabbit.  But Rose wouldn’t bite.  After a chapter or two, she was demanding to go back to Dorothy and friends.  I failed also to interest her for very long in Winnie the Pooh or Laura Ingals Wilder.  We got through a chapter or two or three before the craving for Oz returned. I should note that during this time, my wife had no trouble reading shorter books and little stories to Rose.  At school, too, Rose was very happy with small, more age-appropriate stories.  But reading with Daddy now meant reading big books, long books, and especially the Wizard of Oz. One day, while looking for Christmas themed books, I spotted C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  This was one of my favorites as a child, although I never encountered it until I was much older than Rose.  But it began with a story about a young girl named Lucy.  It had a lion and a witch right in the title.  The illustrations were quite meager but I somehow convinced myself this one might do the trick. It’s not the easiest book to be read out loud.  I’m sure C.S. Lewis never intended it to be read that way at all, certainly not to three-and-a-half year olds.  But right from the beginning Rose loved the book.  The strange creatures—a faun, a dwarf, a giant, centaurs, dryads—provoked lots of questions.  What was Turkish Delight? Why was it always winter and never Christmas?  Who is Aslan? Rose began to play out scenes from the book using her Wizard of Oz characters.  I can’t remember if this was her idea or something I suggested.  Dorothy was Lucy, Miss Gultch (the wicked witch) was Susan, the Tin Man Peter, Scarecrow Edmund, and Glinda as the White Witch.  Of course, the Lion was Aslan.  There are a lot of similarities between the Oz story and the first adventure in Narnia, something I’m not sure anyone has ever noticed before.  Rose noticed.  For instance, in both books small, grey field mice place a very important role as the saviors of the lions.  A note of caution.  Rose’s favorite part of the Wizard of Oz is the field mice rescuing the Cowardly Lion.  But her next favorite parts were “when they killed the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West.” Her favorite part of C.S. Lewis’s book is the Lion killing the witch.  Yes, she beams when Aslan returns from his plight on the Stone Table.  But it is his vanquishing of the White Witch that captures her heart.  I’m not sure all parents would be comfortable with they’re pre-schooler admiring killing—even if it is killing the wicked—so much. Frankly, it doesn’t bother me. My plan had worked.  Narnia had saved me from Oz.  Instead of Munchkinland, we were at the lamppost, instead of Oz we had Cair Paravel, instead of the kind of accident that allows Dorothy to destroy her witch, we had the allegorical sacrifice and resurrection that results in Alan’s triumph over Narnia’s witch. Yesterday we finished reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe for the second time.  I suggested to Rose that we pick a new book to read.  She smiled up at me and said, “Okay, Daddy. We can read the Wizard of Oz.”

roseisrose:

My wife and I have been reading to our daughter Rose since she was first born, on May 19, 2009.  She’s now 3 1/2.  She was born deaf so for the first nine months of her life reading had limited effectiveness. Still, she enjoyed sitting with us and looking at books, so we read to her during the day and, importantly, every night at bed time.

At 9 months Rose was implanted with Cochlear bionic hearing devices.  Reading became a huge part of training Rose to listen to the world and to human voices.  Since she had gone the first nine-months of her life without sound, it was very important to train her to listen well for the first time. 

We began with Bill Martin and Eric Carle’s Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? Obviously this had a thematic relevance to us.  The first sound I remember hearing Rose imitate was my impression of an elephant trumpeting.  It was a real triumph.  In those early days we also read a lot of Sandra Boynton, Eric Carle, Margaret Wise Brown and Mother Goose nursery rhymes.  Dr. Suess was added later, starting with the The Ear Book, The Foot Book, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You.  Also Big Dog, Little Dog and Go Dog Go.

We noticed early on that Rose had an aptitude for memorizing her books.  We encouraged this by pausing while reading and letting her remember what came next.  This was made relatively easy by the pictures in the books.  It’s easier to remember what the Very Hungry Catepillar eats each day because there are pictures of it.  But Rose also showed that she could memorize nursery rhymes easily, even when the pictures didn’t necessarily tip you off about what the words were.

The biggest surprise came the summer after Rose turned two, when we began reading The Little Engine That Could, which was the first book delivered to us by the Dolly Parton charity book service.  Rose loved this book and we read it over and over again.  She insisted that we leave the book in her bed with her so she could look at it at night.  This resulted in tears more than once when she accidentally ripped the pages, which were thin paper pages rather than the board books she had mostly held earlier. 

One night we heard her in her room talking. But she wasn’t really talking. She was reciting the book.  She knew every single phrase, every single word.  It was an amazing discovery.  Our daughter, born deaf, and obviously unable to read at the age of 2, had listened to the words closely enough that she was able to commit all of them to memory.  In fact, she would insist that she be the one who “read” the book at bed time.

Around this time we bought Rose a few Thomas the Tank Engine books ext because she like the Little Engine book so much. Both feature little blue engines.  The first one was “Crack in the Track” followed by “Trains, Cranes, & Troublesome Trucks,” “Go Train Go!” and “Stop Train Stop!” She quickly memorized these books as well.  She fell in love with trains at this time.  We bought her some engines to play with, and some track sets. This year for Christmas she said that her greatest wish was for “more train tracks.”  (Also, her favorite color became blue. When we painted her room, that’s what color she wanted.)

Other books we were reading to Rose between two and three were the Suessians: Hand Hand Fingers Thumb, A Fish Out of Water, Green Eggs and Ham, Wacky Wednesday, and There’s A Wocket in My Pocket.  I also picked up two or three (and later more) Frog and Toad books, which were a big hit with Rose.  She memorized quite a few of these stories. 

I came across a collection of Beatrix Potter stories at a stoop sale in Brooklyn and began to read them to Rose.  She loved the little rabbits so much, although she was a bit afraid of Mr. McGregor.  I think this might have been her first encounter with a “villain.” She had lots of questions about the villains. She wanted to know why Mrs. McGregor put Benjamin’s father into a pie.  We decided to answer her straightforward: because she wanted to eat the rabbit.  She wanted to know why Mr. McGregor wouldn’t share his garden with the rabbits.  Why did Benjamin and Peter insist on going to the garden despite the danger?  There were lots and lots of questions each night.

Rose shortly memorized the Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and the Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  Every word on every page, knowing exactly when to turn the pages. She nick-named herself Flopsy, I became Peter, her mother Mrs. Rabbit, her nanny Mopsy.  Her unborn sister, for whom her mother and I had not yet settled on a name, was Cottontail. Rose began a habit of sleeping with these books in her bed every night, a habit that continues today.  You can often hear her at night in her room reciting these books.   

As you can probably tell, we have a lot of books in our lives.  We read two stories every night, one story on the floor by her bed and another in bed.  Reading is one of Rose’s favorite past times so we read a lot outside of official story time also.  I couldn’t list all of the books if I tried but some of the notable titles that became favorites of Rose included: Leo Lionni’s The Biggest House in the World, The Alphabet Tree, little blue and little yellow; Swimmy; The Big Orange Slot by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Eric Carle’s Papa Please Get the Moon For Me, The Grouchy Lady Bug, The Very Lonely Firefly, and the Very Hungry Catepillar; too many Sandra Boynton books to count, but especially Oh My Oh My Oh Dinosaur, Pajama Time, Snuggle Puppy, Hippos Go Berserk, and Night, Night Little Pooki; and Nancy WHite Carlstrom’s Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Sometime around Rose’s third birthday I picked up a series of books about Quakers in Nantucket that center around a little boy named Obadiah.   It became obvious reading these to Rose that she was becoming very interested in the plots and characters.  In retrospect, we realized that this was one of the reasons she really loved the Peter Rabbit books.  They had many characters with many motivations, and the lead characters were flawed, troublesome youngsters.  They took place in new, and exotic settings (or at least, settings that were exotic to a Brooklyn raised three year old).  And the plots were somewhat suspenseful.  Would Peter get caught? Would Obadiah win the race with his sister Rachel? 

By the way, these elements also made them very fun for adults to read.  You can only read so many sweet rhyming books, or even silly rhyming books, before your eyes glaze over a bit.  Stories with characters, settings, plots and surprise really shine after a few years of rhymes and simpler stories.  (Not to knock those too hard; I recommend every single book I’ve named above—with the exception perhaps of the Thomas books, which are too simple for my tastes.)

Around this time our daughter began to sing with her nanny a lot more.  Her first nanny had shown her a few songs from Sesame Street on YouTube, including Feist singing “One Two Three Four” and Elmo singing the Alphabet song.  Her next nanny began playing some more grownup fair, including Judy Garland singing “I Was Born In Michigan” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”  Rose knew these songs by heart.

Now Rose had long had a set of finger puppets of characters from the Wizard of Oz.  The nanny taught Rose about the characters by playing their songs on YouTube.  Rose grew fascinated with them.  I eventually showed her the scene of the Wicked Witch of the West melting, something that frightened her not at all.  At some point, a few months after Rose was 3 years old, my wife watched the entire film with Rose on a rainy day when I was out of town.  Rose was enthralled with Dorothy and her friends.  In her mind, she went from being Flopsy to being Dorothy.

I decided to buy a copy of the L. Frank Baum novel that was the basis of the movie.  I had never read the book but had always been curious about it.  I picked up the 100th Anniversary edition, which is a facsimile of the 1900 first edition, including 24 full-color plates and 130 two-color illustrations.

Now this book is over 200 pages long, spread out over 24 chapters.  Attempting to read such a thing to a three-year old was at least a little bit crazy.  All the experts in reading say you do not really introduce children to chapter books until much later, and even then they should be much, much shorter—100 pages at the most. 

I had no right to expect Rose to have the attention span to follow pages crammed with this many words, much less a story that went on for so long.  At two chapters a night, it would take us nearly two weeks to finish the book. Nights I had to work late would test her attention span because the period in which she had to keep the story in her mind would stretch out even longer.  Looking back on it now, I think it was not only foolish but a bit selfish to read this book to her so early.  Was I really reading it for her or because I wanted to read it?

Perhaps because she already knew some of the story and identified so strongly with Dorothy, she was engaged immediately.  Her attention span never wavered.  She had lots of questions, many about the difference between the film and book.  The good witch who meets Dorothy in Munchkinland is not named Glinda, is not from the South, is not young, and is not pretty.  The magical shoes are silver instead of ruby red.  Nobody sings.

We didn’t end up reading the book every night.  I was working late a lot at this time, so I read Wizard of Oz only a few nights during the week.  My wife read other stories on nights I wasn’t home.  This meant it took nearly a month to read the entire book. 

Rose never seemed to lose interest or lose track of what was happening in the plot.  She followed right along.  The finger puppets seemed to help. She would act out the scenes with her puppets.  This was so adorable we eventually upgraded her to rag dolls that were much larger—and less easily misplaced—than the finger puppets.

As soon as we were done with book, with Dorothy safely returned to Kansas, Rose wanted to read it again.  I was a bit wary about my own patience for reading a full-length novel twice in row.  But the second time around I got better.  I invented special voices for each of the characters: a soft, child like voice for Dorothy; a robot-like voice for the Tin Man; a growl for the Lion; a goofy, simpleton voice for Scarecrow.  Rose really loved the book the second time through it, which meant we were in for a third reading.

Her younger sister—formerly known as Cottontail and now known as Madeline—was born in early October. Rose had no doubt what she was going to be for Halloween.  She was Dorothy. Madeline was Toto.  I was the Tin Man.  My wife was the Scarecrow. 

As we walked around Park Slope Halloween night, trick-or-treating at the local shops on 7th Avenue, Rose would point out the witches.  “Look, Daddy, another witch!” A friend asked if Rose was scared of the witches.  So I asked her.

“No, Daddy. I’m not afraid of the witches. They’re afraid of me. Because I’m going to melt them,” she said.

As amazed as I was that Rose had the attention span to listen to such a long book, I began to dread the prospect of reading it a fourth or a fifth time.  I also worried.  Was it healthy to read the same book this many times? Rose often talked to the witch alone in her bedroom, arguing over the shoes and threatening to melt her.  It’s a bit creepy to hear a toddler talking to an imaginary witch.  Isn’t that how those demonic possession movies start?  Rose wore her Dorothy costume around the house quite often. 

I bought a couple of other big books in an attempt to turn her away from the Wizard of Oz.  I started with the sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is called The Marvelous Land of Oz. It follows the further adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in Oz.  Rose lasted a few chapters before growing restless. She wanted to know where Dorothy was.  She wasn’t interested in the main character, an adolescent boy named Tip.

So I bought Alice in Wonderland.  It featured a young girl chasing a bunny into another world! Sort of Dorothy meets Peter Rabbit.  But Rose wouldn’t bite.  After a chapter or two, she was demanding to go back to Dorothy and friends.  I failed also to interest her for very long in Winnie the Pooh or Laura Ingals Wilder.  We got through a chapter or two or three before the craving for Oz returned.

I should note that during this time, my wife had no trouble reading shorter books and little stories to Rose.  At school, too, Rose was very happy with small, more age-appropriate stories.  But reading with Daddy now meant reading big books, long books, and especially the Wizard of Oz.

One day, while looking for Christmas themed books, I spotted C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.  This was one of my favorites as a child, although I never encountered it until I was much older than Rose.  But it began with a story about a young girl named Lucy.  It had a lion and a witch right in the title.  The illustrations were quite meager but I somehow convinced myself this one might do the trick.

It’s not the easiest book to be read out loud.  I’m sure C.S. Lewis never intended it to be read that way at all, certainly not to three-and-a-half year olds.  But right from the beginning Rose loved the book.  The strange creatures—a faun, a dwarf, a giant, centaurs, dryads—provoked lots of questions.  What was Turkish Delight? Why was it always winter and never Christmas?  Who is Aslan?

Rose began to play out scenes from the book using her Wizard of Oz characters.  I can’t remember if this was her idea or something I suggested.  Dorothy was Lucy, Miss Gultch (the wicked witch) was Susan, the Tin Man Peter, Scarecrow Edmund, and Glinda as the White Witch.  Of course, the Lion was Aslan. 

There are a lot of similarities between the Oz story and the first adventure in Narnia, something I’m not sure anyone has ever noticed before.  Rose noticed.  For instance, in both books small, grey field mice place a very important role as the saviors of the lions. 

A note of caution.  Rose’s favorite part of the Wizard of Oz is the field mice rescuing the Cowardly Lion.  But her next favorite parts were “when they killed the Wicked Witch of the East and the Wicked Witch of the West.” Her favorite part of C.S. Lewis’s book is the Lion killing the witch.  Yes, she beams when Aslan returns from his plight on the Stone Table.  But it is his vanquishing of the White Witch that captures her heart.  I’m not sure all parents would be comfortable with they’re pre-schooler admiring killing—even if it is killing the wicked—so much. Frankly, it doesn’t bother me.

My plan had worked.  Narnia had saved me from Oz.  Instead of Munchkinland, we were at the lamppost, instead of Oz we had Cair Paravel, instead of the kind of accident that allows Dorothy to destroy her witch, we had the allegorical sacrifice and resurrection that results in Alan’s triumph over Narnia’s witch.

Yesterday we finished reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe for the second time.  I suggested to Rose that we pick a new book to read.  She smiled up at me and said, “Okay, Daddy. We can read the Wizard of Oz.”

Dec 27 2012

Photo

In which Felix Salmon and John Carney solve the debt-ceiling problem over IM

Nov 30 2012

Conversation

How To Win Powerball

Why It’s Hard But Not Impossible to Guarantee A Win

Nov 27 2012

Link

“

Una Neary, tapped yesterday to become one of the newest partners at Goldman Sachs, is not one of the best-known executives at that storied investment bank.

But there is one place in New York City where everybody knows her name—the Upper East Side high-end Irish pub named “Neary’s.”

The place was opened on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1967 by Una’s father, Jimmy Neary, who immigrated to New York from Sligo, Ireland in 1954 and still can be found at his namesake establishment greeting customers almost every evening. Una, the eldest daughter of Jimmy, was born a couple of years later and worked there as she grew up, alongside her sister Ann Marie and mother Eileen.

“Una was practically raised here,” one long-time regular said.

”

Meet the Goldman Partner Raised In A Bar, by John Carney

Nov 15 2012

Quote

felixsalmon:

before, after

Wow.

Nov 3 2012

Video

Does New York Need a Redesign?

Actually, New York’s infrastructure handled the storm of the century pretty damn well. Maybe we shouldn’t change a thing.

Oct 30 2012

Link

Gay Marriage and Obamacare

A federal appeals court in New York ruled against the Defense of Marriage Act yesterday, setting the stage for the constitutionality of law to be reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The opponents of the 1996 law are full of hope that the court will strike it down.  In the first place, the four liberal judges will quite clearly find it unconstitutional, leaving Justice Anthony Kennedy with the deciding vote.  Kennedy wrote the opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down anti-sodomy laws, so it’s not irrational to anticipate Kennedy striking down the Defense of Marriage Act.

The opponents of the law also believe they have very strong facts on their side in this case. I think they’re wrong about this, for reasons related to the recent Obamacare decision that I’ll explain in a moment.

The plaintiff, Edith Windsor, is obviously a sympathetic character. She’s an 83 year-old lesbian who married her partner of 40 years, Thea Spyer, in Canada in 2007.  At the time, the state of New York did not yet allow same sex marriages to be performed but it did recognize out of state same sex marriages.  (Last year, the Marriage Equality Act was voted into law, legalizing in-state same sex marriages in New York.)

When Spyer died in 2010, the Internal Revenue Service contended that Windsor could not claim a spousal deduction for the federal estate tax because the Defense of Marriage Act prohibited the federal government from recognizing the marriage, even though the couple were married under New York law. As a result, Windsor faced an estate tax bill of $363,053.

At first glance, this sounds like a pretty good case to bring against the Defense of Marriage Act. It would take a hard-hearted person to not feel sympathetic toward Windsor, whose loss of a lifelong companion the government greeted with a huge tax bill.  And the federal government’s refusal to recognize a marriage legal under New York law at least has an anti-federalism smell to it. 

At the very least, some Republican politicians will probably find it hard to oppose a case in which the plaintiff is aggrieved by a “death tax” and the federal government is encroaching on authority traditionally reserved for the states.  (On a personal level, let me say that I oppose the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that it federalizes marriage questions best left to the states.)

But the very fact that Windsor v. United States turns on a tax levied by the federal government may actually make it a very bad case for opponents of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Under the precedent of Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in the Affordable Care Act case, the tax connection may in fact save the Defense of Marriage Act.

The constitution grants Congress a broad power to “lay and collect Taxes” and courts have generally been very deferential to Congressional authority here.

Chief Justice Roberts found the that while a lot of 19th and 20th century case law demonstrated Congressional authority was not totally unlimited when it came to taxes, “more recently we have declined to closely examine the regulatory motive or effect of revenue-raising measures.”

For Obamacare, this meant that the constitutionality of the individual mandate could be upheld as an exercise of tax-power even if a direct mandate to purchase health insurance would have fallen outside of the scope of Congressional authority under the Commerce Clause.  The government, in other words, can further its goals through taxes even when it could not do so through direct regulatory command.

If the court applies this line of reasoning to the Windsor case, I think the Defense of Marriage Act survives constitutional scrutiny.  The court would decline to examine the “regulatory motive” for defining marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman,” making claims about the discriminatory intent behind the Defense of Marriage Act inapplicable.  Even if disfavoring same sex marriage might be unconstitutional in many other contexts, in the case of taxes it might be upheld.

Many of the same elements that played into the Obamacare opinion apply here. Windsor isn’t facing any penalty other than a requirement to pay estate taxes. These could have been avoided through a marriage recognized by the federal tax code, just as the health insurance tax can be avoided by buying federally recognized health insurance. The feds aren’t going to jail you for getting gay-married, they just won’t give you (or any unmarried person) a tax-preference preference they’ve reserved for opposite-sex spouses.

As Chief Justice Roberts explained in the ACA case, “Put simply, Congress may tax and spend. This grant gives the Federal Government considerable influence even in areas where it cannot directly regulate.  The Federal Government may enact a tax on an activity that it cannot authorize, forbid, or otherwise control.”

It could be argued that the difference here is that Obamacare involved the Commerce Clause while this case turns on equal protection. The problem with this argument is that many provisions of the tax code are discriminatory in ways we find obnoxious in other contexts—and yet they are presumably constitutional. For example, we generally prohibit employers from discriminating on the basis of marital status. And yet this kind of discrimination is all over the tax code.

If it seems a bit odd to view the Windsor case through the lens of taxes, keep in mind that there would be no case at all if Congress hadn’t decided to tax estates. The entire case turns on Congressional authority to set the grounds for a revenue generating tax. If there were no taxable estate or no estate taxes, the Windsor case would not have arisen.

Note that an Obamacare based decision would be a very limited ruling. It would only apply to uses of Congresses taxing power. In other contexts, such the rights of non-citizen same-sex spouses, the Defense of Marriage Act wouldn’t have recourse to the Obamacare tax logic and might well be struck down.

I think the very narrowness of this kind of decision will be appealing to Justice Kennedy—and probably Roberts as well. Instead of having to decide a highly-politicized question with national effect, the case could be resolved on the narrow grounds of taxes. With the country moving quite obviously toward acceptance of same sex marriages, this would give the court the opportunity to allow the issue to be resolved politically instead of once again placing the court at the forefront of social change.

Of course, none of this might matter if a majority of justices agree with the Second Circuit that homosexuals are a “quasi-suspect” class justifying an intermediate level of judicial scrutiny. If that argument prevails, the Defense of Marriage Act is likely to fall. But its worth keeping in mind that the court—especially Kennedy— has avoided applying this kind of scrutiny in past cases, such as Lawrence, and may be hesitant to create such a doctrinal expansion now.

Even if I’m right about the taxing power argument here, I think the case is likely to undermine support for the Defense of Marriage Act. The facts on the ground—same sex marriage recognized in six states so far—have changed along with people’s attitudes.  The concept of same sex marriage is no longer as novel or foreign as it once was—which makes the nightmare scenarios of its legal recognition less plausible than they once were.

The case of the elderly lady facing an enormous tax bill despite her legal marriage to a long term partner is likely to strike many as the perverse and unintended result of the expansion of federal authority in this area.

Oct 19 2012

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I’m really disappointed with myself for never making it to this thing.

andrearosen:

hallowmeme:

Only 6 shopping days left ‘til HallowMEME and stakes are high: Previous years’ HallowMEME costume contest winners have gone onto supreme internet fame and walked home with some srs prizes — this year’s prizes are furnished by Giant Media, Tumblr, Busted Tees and other friends of HallowMEME.

As always, we have an esteemed panel of internet experts on whose judgement your throwback Dancing Baby costume will live or die. They are:

Christopher “Topherchris” Price & Amanda Ferri, cool kids of Tumblr

Cole Stryker, Senior Social Media Strategist at Giant Media; author of Epic Win for Anonymous and Hacking the Future; 4chan sweetheart

Emmy Blotnick, Josh Lay & Cory Cavin, the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bloggers

…and contest emcee Grace Helbig of My Damn Channel’s Daily Grace

There’s still time to RSVP: hallowmeme2012.eventbrite.com

Half of my HallowMEME costume arrived in the mail today. IT’S GETTING SO REAL.

(Source: hallowmeme)

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