Jaltcoh

The top 10 songs of the first decade of the 2000s

2009-12-07T07:33:00.013-05:00

After almost 200 songs, we've finally made it to the top 10 of the past 10 years.

Just to heighten the suspense, I'll add another two songs to this post every weekday morning this week, concluding on Friday.

Next week, I'll analyze what made this decade of music what it is.

(Click here for the whole list.)

10. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy

9. Sufjan Stevens - Chicago

8. Of Montreal - Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games

Let's have bizarre celebrations!

7. Dresden Dolls - Coin-Operated Boy

This is an ingeniously constructed song. It starts out all jaunty and full of innuendo for a few verses. The singer, Amanda Palmer, then takes the song deeper into her psyche by describing the songwriting process itself: "This bridge was written to make you feel smitten-er / With my sad picture of girl getting bitter-er...." The shift in the lyrics and music here (flowing arpeggios instead of percussive chords) seems to tell us we've left the physical world and entered her stream of consciousness. The bridge culminates with an obsessively repeated "I want it -- ," then "I want you -- ," then "I want a -- " while the whole band mimics the repetitive, jerky movements of a wind-up toy (a lyrical and musical transition back to the verse). When Palmer finally finishes the sentence with the same words and melody that started the song ("...coin-operated boy"), her delivery has lost its previous childlike quality. She sounds weary from the one-sided relationship. At the end, the band winds down like a toy running out of batteries. Not only does Palmer's voice slow down along with everything else, but she sounds unexpectedly meek, as though it were dawning on her that she doesn't quite believe everything she's been singing.

6. St. Vincent - Paris Is Burning

This solo live performance gives you just a taste of her richly textured production on the album.

5. The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

I remember sitting in a cafe a few years ago, hearing this chorus for the first time -- "You seem so out of context/In this gaudy apartment complex" -- and thinking, "Hm, that's a pretty clever hook." Since then, I've probably listened to this song hundreds of times, and it still sounds startlingly new.

4. Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

The rock anthem of the decade.

3. Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek

Here's Imogen Heap's description of how this song came to be:

“My favorite computer blew up on me. ... But I didn't want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, ‘Where are we? What the hell is going on?’ I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play 10 notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It's quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that's a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn't feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I'm not questioning that one at all.”

The result sounds like a 21st-century version of a Renaissance madrigal.

Have you ever thought to yourself: if God is watching me and has to choose the single greatest 5 minutes of my life, what would they be? For Imogen Heap, the answer just might be those 5 minutes when she was creating this:

To be continued...

Does America's military really protect our freedom?

2009-12-05T08:25:00.004-05:00

Will Wilkinson, in a blog post I wish I had written about patriotism and war, admits that he doesn't know -- and neither do you, or anyone else.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (20-11)

2009-12-04T07:04:00.027-05:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

20. The Strokes - Last Nite

Proof that rock music hasn't progressed too far beyond Bo Diddley. And the Strokes probably owe royalties to Tom Petty based on "American Girl." (Petty himself noticed the similarity but says he doesn't mind.) Based on the last minute or so of this video, they also owe more respect to their drum mikes.

19. Spoon - Everything Hits at Once

18. Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark

17. Regina Spektor - Us

I even love her wrong notes!

(Here's the lovely music video.)

16. Rufus Wainwright - I Don't Know What It Is

This is a good example of the fact that I mainly care about the music, not the lyrics. I'm not saying these are bad lyrics, but I don't really know what they mean, and they're certainly not the 16th best lyrics of the decade.

Regardless, this is a masterful fitting of melody to chord progressions. He must have taken exquisite care in writing this song to make it sound so effortless.

(You can listen to the album version on last.fm.)

15. Bjork - Hidden Place

The apotheosis of introversion.

The build-up from the final verse ("Can I hide there too?") to the final chorus is quietly overwhelming. She gets so much feeling out of singing the words slightly off from the beat.

(Album version on last.fm.)

14. Goldfrapp - A & E

When I said (in this post) that one of the criteria I used in deciding whether to include a song on the list was...

Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)

... this is one of the songs I particularly had in mind. Wow.

13. Frou Frou - Let Go

You can listen to the album version on last.fm or watch this (very different) unplugged version by Imogen Heap, who is half of the defunct duo Frou Frou:

12. Radiohead - Sit Down. Stand Up. (Snakes & Ladders.)

A Slate reviewer said: "When 'Sit Down. Stand Up' quickens, turns on a dime, then explodes into furious broken bass chords and electro-beats and monkish chants of 'The raindrops, the raindrops,' I'm hearing something I've never heard before, something, quite literally, sensational."

(You can listen to the album version on imeem.com. Free registration is required.)

11. Rilo Kiley - Does He Love You?

Ditto the above comments on Goldfrapp's "A & E."

(Album version on imeem.com -- free registration required.)

A conservative's message to conservatives: Support President Obama on Afghanistan.

2009-12-02T20:00:00.004-05:00

Ramesh Ponnuru says:

Conservatives fear that the president looks weak abroad; they should not reinforce the impression. They worry that the war is losing support at home; they should not make it come true. The right course for conservatives--and the one most of us are going to take--is to applaud the president for doing the right thing, hope for the best, and urge course corrections when necessary.

"Aggravated homosexuality"

2009-12-02T09:58:00.000-05:00

Uganda is considering legislation to make that a criminal offense.

The definition of the crime, according to that article, would be: being HIV positive and having gay sex.

The punishment: death.

If you merely have gay sex in Uganda, without being HIV positive, the punishment under the proposed law would be life imprisonment.

Also:

The Bill proposes a three-year prison sentence for anyone who is aware of evidence of homosexuality and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. And it would impose a sentence of up to seven years for anyone who defends the rights of gays and lesbians.

Live-blogging President Obama's prime-time speech on Afghanistan

2009-12-01T20:13:00.012-05:00

8:04 - Obama coins a portmanteau word: "toperatives."

8:09 - "Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years now, it has moved backwards." Obama's delivery here was uncannily evocative of George W. Bush's.

8:14 - I'm glad Obama says, of the war on terrorism, "This is not just America's war," and lists some of the terrorist attacks that have happened around the world since September 11, 2001. A welcome change from the glibly myopic refrain we heard during the Bush administration that "we" haven't been attacked again.

[UPDATE: Here's the prepared text of the speech. The key passage:]

We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region. Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America's war. Since 9/11, al Qaeda's safe-havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali. The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them. These facts compel us to act along with our friends and allies.

8:27 - A long-term commitment to nation-building in Afghanistan can't be fulfilled "at a reasonable cost." "The nation I'm most interested in building is our own." It's refreshing to finally have a president who's willing to bluntly acknowledge, in the context of foreign policy, that our capabilities are finite and that trade-offs sometimes need to be made.

[Another update from the transcript:]

I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. Going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly 30 billion dollars for the military this year, and I will work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

(By contrast, here's Bush's second inaugural address: "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. ... America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.")

8:35 - He ends with a mix of Obama-like inspiration and Bush-like resolve: "Our cause is just. ... Right makes might."

I'm not qualified to judge the actual military strategy Obama was announcing with this speech. (How many people watching could honestly say they are?) But the speech itself was as smoothly effective as we've come to expect from Obama.

UPDATE: Here's the complete video:

Some quick common sense on the leaked Climate Research Unit emails

2009-12-01T12:32:00.010-05:00

1. Matthew Yglesias.

2. Will Wilkinson.

How to make economics confusing enough to get published

2009-11-30T20:32:00.002-05:00

In an article called "Confessions of an Economist: Writing to Impress Rather than to Inform" (PDF), economics professor David R. Hakes tells this story about academia's perverse bias in favor of inscrutability (via The Church of Rationality):

A colleague presented a fairly complex paper on how firms might use warranties to extract rent from certain users of their products. No one in the audience seemed to follow the argument. Because I found the argument to be perfectly clear, I repeatedly defended the author and I was able to bring the audience to an understanding of the paper. The author was so pleased that I was able to understand his work and explain it to others that he asked me if I was willing to coauthor the paper with him. I said I would be delighted.

We managed to reduce the equations in the paper to six. At this stage the paper was perfectly clear and was written at a level so that it could reach a broad audience. When we submitted the paper to risk, uncertainty, and insurance journals, the referees responded that the results were self-evident. After some degree of frustration, my coauthor suggested that the problem with the paper might be that we had made the argument too easy to follow, and thus referees and editors were not sufficiently impressed. He said that he could make the paper more impressive by generalizing the model. While making the same point as the original paper, the new paper would be more mathematically elegant, and it would become absolutely impenetrable to most readers. The resulting paper had fifteen equations, two propositions and proofs, dozens of additional mathematical expressions, and a mathematical appendix containing nineteen equations and even more mathematical expressions. I personally could no longer understand the paper and I could not possibly present the paper alone.

The paper was published in the first journal to which we submitted. ... While the audience for the original version of the paper was broad, the audience for the published version of the paper has been reduced to a very narrow set of specialists and mathematicians. Even for mathematicians, ... the time and effort necessary to read the paper may exceed the benefits received from reading it. I am now part of the conspiracy to intentionally make simple ideas obscure and complex.

Alas, although he says in the article's conclusion that he'll try to "write to inform rather than to impress," he admits he'll still occasionally succumb to the professional norm of obfuscation:

If in the future a referee or an editor suggests that I "generalize the model" or "make the model dynamic" when I feel that the change is an unnecessary complication which will likely cloud the issue rather than illuminate it, I will probably do as they requested rather than fight for clarity.

Previously: the philosophy equivalent.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (30-21)

2009-11-27T07:29:00.013-05:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

From now to the end of the list, we're clearly in "true greatness" territory.

30. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps

The kind of song that inspires graffiti.

29. The Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies)

28. The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Pure rock.

27. Esperanza Spalding - Precious

26. MGMT - Kids

Earlier this year, I was obsessed with this song, which I said "feels (to me, at least) like a living, breathing creature on the prowl."

The instrumental interlude (starting around 3:00) is outstanding. First, there's an adventurous and floridly Baroque keyboard solo. This is abruptly cut off and followed by a simple but exhilarating drum passage, backed by just one relentlessly repeated chord. There's no pretense that this might have been played on organic instruments; it sounds like it was played on the most rudimentary of synthesizers. Then the bottom drops out for a moment, and we're back to the catchy chorus.

25. Radiohead - Idioteque

With impassioned vocals and minimalist instrumentation consisting of a thumping drum beat and spare minor chord progression, this sounds like the Radiohead equivalent of Prince's "When Doves Cry."

24. Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken

When I listen to Camera Obscura, I imagine a band from the early '60s traveling through time to the '00s and trying to fit in.

23. The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??

Poignant rock.

22. The Dodos - Red and Purple

I started listening to this song around the time I, along with many others, had to say an emotional goodbye to someone important to us. I can't disclose who it was, but there are so many parallels to this song's lyrics that it gives me chills. On the day we had to say goodbye, many people showed up wearing this person's favorite colors: red and purple.

21. Rihanna (featuring Jay-Z) - Umbrella

Possibly the youngest singer on the list -- she was 19 when she recorded this song.

Per Wikipedia, the song has been covered by a wide variety of artists. Here's Vanilla Sky's gender-bending version.

Mark Bittman and Ezra Klein on how to eat rationally on Thanksgiving (and other days)

2009-11-25T18:53:00.001-05:00

Why do more parents want to have girls than boys?

2009-11-25T06:20:00.039-05:00

Mickey Kaus seems incredulous that parents who use baby sex selection services usually prefer girls. He quotes this passage from an article in Elle:

Seventy-one percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter. ... “The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return,” founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said.

What’s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. ...

“The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls,” says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. “They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.” Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl cafe. What’s not to like?

Others link the yearning to women’s belief that they’ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. ...

Kaus responds:

Maybe I'm out of it, but I was unaware that parents now want girls, not boys. ... Girls are boys plus? That's one way to look at it. I don't quite believe this trend (though some of my Westside yuppie friends confirm it).

Well, yes, this has been going on for a while. Ten years ago, the New York Times magazine reported, in a cover story called "Getting the Girl":

Americans, unlike much of the rest of the world, do not prefer boys. Of the first 111 Microsort attempts, 83 were for females and 28 were for males. True, the process began as a way to select for girls, and true, because it is better at selecting girls it is more likely to attract couples who want them. But there is something else going on as well, something Shettles and Ericsson learned a long time ago.

''More want girls,'' Shettles says. ''Definitely we heard more from women who had many boys and wanted a girl.''

Ericsson, too. ''We see more requests for girls,'' he says. At some Ericsson clinics, the ratio is as high as 2 to 1, despite Ericsson's own statistics showing a higher success rate for boys. It is, he says, a gap that has been growing since he first introduced his method 25 years ago.

In a lopsided, counterintuitive way, he insists, this is a streak of feminism, although it hardly appears that way at first, what with all the talk of ponytails, dresses and bows. ...

Also in keeping with [Ericsson's] experience, most [women on a sex selection website] yearn to parent girls. They speak of Barbies and ballet and butterfly barrettes. They also describe the desire to rear strong young women. Some want to recreate their relationships with their own mothers; a few want to do better by their daughters than their mothers did by them. They want their sons to have sisters, so that they learn to respect women. They want their husbands to have little girls. But many of them want a daughter simply because they always thought they would have one. They feel that their little girl is out there, somewhere. Every so often, while their boys are playing, they catch a mind's eye glimpse of her, and wonder where she is.

Back to Kaus -- he adds:

It seems to me men still have a lot of advantages, the lack of a mommy track being only the most obvious. But if true ... it would be an extraordinary example of relative changes in earning power affecting fairly basic and millenia-old socio-cultural preferences with startling rapidity--another victory for Vulgar Marxism ...

I can't quite disagree with Kaus's literal words when he says that men have "a lot of advantages"; after all, you probably could list "a lot" of them if you decided to. But I don't accept the implication that men have most of the advantages. As I've blogged before, men have plenty of disadvantages too. I'd be interested to know which advantages Kaus had in mind that he would have expected to tilt the scales in favor of parents wanting sons.

The only specific example he gives -- that girls are on a "mommy track" -- cuts both ways. You could see that as a downside. But when we're talking about the modern-day United States, where there's no question that it's socially acceptable for women to do any job they want, the option to forgo professional advancement and focus on being a parent seems like an advantage. All other things being equal, it's better to have more rather than fewer choices about how to live your life. Of course, it is possible for the father to do most of the parenting -- but there are still powerful social norms against it. There are no equivalent barriers to women being stay-at-home moms or having high-powered jobs.

Of course, the parents' preferences aren't just objective calculations about the costs and benefits of being born a girl or a boy. As the Elle and NYT articles point out, a mother might want to have a daughter because she imagines they'd have a stronger relationship or because this conforms to her dream of how her life will end up. But if the parents are thinking about costs and benefits, they might want to have a girl -- who's less likely to be laid off in a recession, go to prison, or fight in a war, and more likely to grow up to earn a bachelor's degree, make more money (at least if she lives in a big city), and live longer.

Was he "homeless" or a "drifter"?

2009-11-23T13:32:00.013-05:00

My mom talks about this and more as she deftly dissects the language the Daily Mail uses to report that an exterminator killed a germophobe in a subway car, which stayed enclosed with other passengers inside until the police showed up.

Scientific happiness studies are missing the point.

2009-11-23T08:05:00.000-05:00

"The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable."

So says Mark Vernon (who also writes the excellent "Philosophy and Life Blog"), channeling Robert Schoch's book The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life.

The whole article is well worth reading and worth keeping in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that researchers have discovered that people who do such-and-such are "happier" than people who do so-and-so.

An always unconvincing sentence

2009-11-22T11:22:00.000-05:00

"I'm not thinking about my reelection."

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (40-31)

2009-11-20T06:19:00.014-05:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

40. Decoder Ring - Fractions

39. The Dresden Dolls - Good Day

38. Andrew Bird - A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left

37. Tori Amos - A Sorta Fairytale

36. OutKast - Ms. Jackson

Yes, there is a rap song on the list, though you might not have expected it from the blogger who wrote this post!

35. My Brightest Diamond - Inside a Boy

34. Mika - Grace Kelly

And here's a solo unplugged live performance.

33. John Mayer - Daughters

I couldn't stand this song when I first heard it (playing in a convenience store). It was just too earnestly tear-jerking, with eye-rollingly gendered lyrics. Later on, for some reason, I suddenly found it perfectly effective.

32. Dntel - (This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan

This song was created by the same lineup as The Postal Service.

Another blog, The Factual Opinion, ranked this the best song of the decade, saying:

The 2001 people imagined decades ago must have sounded like this--the electronic squall, the nearly overwhelming surge of drums, the drifting grasp on reality. ... 8 years on, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” sounds like a future that we still haven't caught up with.

The Factual Opinion quotes the line, "He then played every song from 1993," and says, "I always imagine that he’s talking about hearing *every* song from 1993, from 'Whoomp (There It Is)' to 'Mr. Jones.'" Although that's what the line would seem to literally mean, I always imagine that he's talking about Kurt Cobain in the last full year of his life, and "every song from 1993" means every one of his songs from 1993 -- in other words, In Utero, Nirvana's last studio album. That's why (I imagine) Ben Gibbard wittily accentuates the next line, which I hear as a reference to Cobain's famous diffidence toward his own success: "The crowd applauded as he curtsied bashfully."

31. Polydream - Hollywood

Click here to play the mp3. (Authorized by the band.)

(Full disclosure: I'm friends with these guys.)

Why isn't there "philosophy of journalism"? Or how about journalism of philosophy?

2009-11-18T06:49:00.113-05:00

There should be courses in "philosophy of journalism," says Professor Carlin Romano. He teaches such a course at Yale. (The article is via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Prof. Romano frames the issue this way:

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you'll find staple courses in "Philosophy of Law," "Philosophy of Art," "Philosophy of Science," "Philosophy of Religion," and a fair number of other areas that make up our world.

It makes sense. Philosophy, as the intellectual enterprise that in its noblest form inspects all areas of life and questions each practice's fundamental concepts and presumptions, should regularly look at all human activities broad and persistent enough not to be aberrations or idiosyncrasies. ...

Why, then, don't you find "Philosophy of Journalism" among those staple courses?

Listing those topics creates a sense that you could have a philosophical field to correspond to every profession, but things don't work out so neatly. "Philosophy of art" is trying to penetrate the very nature of what artists create by asking, "What is art?" I don't think "philosophy of journalism" would be about trying to define journalism or explain what journalists do, since that wouldn't be a very challenging philosophical task.

Based on Prof. Romano's description of his lesson plans, he seems to be using journalism as a platform to discuss ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy. Journalism isn't a sui generis subject of philosophical inquiry; it's a bundle of human interactions that can be analyzed philosophically within traditional branches of philosophy that have existed for centuries. (In this respect, "philosophy of religion" is closer to "philosophy of journalism" than to "philosophy of art." Trying to define "religion" may be a worthwhile exercise, but it's unlikely to be the main point of a philosophy of religion class.)

I'm actually so convinced by his argument that this kind of class is worth teaching that I don't find the article too interesting. Instead of an article about whether there should be a philosophy of journalism, I'd rather see some discussion of whether there should be journalism about philosophy.

The New York Times, for instance, regularly reports on some of the more socially important academic breakthroughs, even including some that happen to be of interest to philosophers. But I can't remember seeing the Times directly report on a philosopher's ideas -- except in an obituary. You regularly read news articles about how the latest brain experiment has revealed so-and-so. Well, that's how the news likes to present it, but the truth is rarely so clear-cut or sensational. A headline-grabbing story based on brain scans is probably going to be highly conjectural, in part because brain imaging doesn't yet have much explanatory power.

Could any philosophical insight about the brain and/or the mind be significant enough to be reported in the New York Times? I'm sure reporters would say philosophical thoughts are too abstract to count as "news" at all. But philosophers of mind should stay sufficiently up to date with the latest neurological discoveries so that their philosophizing actually is timely.

I wish we lived in a world where philosophical ideas routinely made the news. I'm not sure if the journalists or the philosophers are more to blame. Probably the philosophers.

My dad reports from a Rwandan genocide site, "including as few details as I can."

2009-11-16T06:24:00.000-05:00

"The memorial rooms stink of death, still."

Clicking on the photograph of "a mother holding her child" goes to the full-size version. Sitting here in the comfort of our rooms, it's impossible to appreciate the full horror contained in that photo.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (50-41)

2009-11-13T07:37:00.008-05:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

50. Beirut - Elephant Gun

49. Feist - Mushaboom

48. Fort Wilson Riot - An Imagined Civil State

Here's the mp3 (from the band's official website), and here's a minute-and-a-half excerpt:

The song is from their acclaimed rock opera, Idigaragua.

Full disclosure: The singer/guitarist is my friend and former bandmate Jacob Mullis.

47. The Polyphonic Spree - Light and Day/Reach for the Sun

46. Hot Hot Heat - No, Not Now

45. Rufus Wainwright - Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

44. Elliott Smith - Son of Sam

This isn't the ideal list to represent Elliott Smith, who did most of his work in the '90s. He likely would have made more great music in this decade if not for his horrific death in 2003.

43. Seal - Waiting for You

42. St. Vincent - Marry Me

I promise I'd rank this song exactly the same even if I had a different first name!

I'm usually more focused on music than lyrics, so I'll just excerpt Summer Anne, who listed this song at #93 in her list:

many of her songs, lyrically, are like little puzzles waiting for you to solve them. They are personal, seemingly, but also cryptic and distant. She doesn’t hit you over the head with anything. This song is the perfect example. The lyrics are perfectly poetic and, like good poetry, grow with meaning every time they are studied:

But you, you’re a rock with a heart like a socket
I can plug into at will
And will you guess when I come around next
I hope your open sign is blinking still.

41. Ben Folds - Zak and Sara

Goethe for bloggers

2009-11-12T05:35:00.140-05:00

I recently bought Goethe's Maxims and Reflections at the fantastic NYC bookstore Three Lives. I started reading it yesterday morning over breakfast and underlined numerous passages. I was initially concerned that the book -- a posthumously compiled set of aphorisms from the early 19th century -- might seem dry or antiquated, but it's quite the opposite. It has less wit and pithiness than the standard quotations book, but it makes up for this by having more actual insight.

Here are three thoughts I want to keep in mind while blogging:

[N]o one should be silent or give in; we must talk and be up and doing, not in order to vanquish, but so as to keep on the alert; whether with the majority or the minority is a matter of indifference. [#159]

It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth.... [#166]

Surely the world is quite full enough of riddles for us not to need to turn the simplest phenomena into riddles too? [#81]

Finally, here's a point that I hope we Americans can appreciate:

No nation attains the power of judgement until it can sit in judgement on itself. [#113]

(To those who might sit in judgment of that spelling: the book was published in the UK.)

As a side note, other people also deserve credit for this wonderful little book: (1) Elisabeth Stopp, who completed the translation shortly before she died and saw it as the crowning achievement of her life, (2) Max Hecker, who compiled the maxims (Goethe jotted them down on scrap paper over the course of decades and used about half of them in other works), and (3) various sources, many of them unknown -- the book euphemistically points out that Goethe would "borrow" other people's aphorisms without including quotation marks or attribution.

Another lull

2009-11-08T22:19:00.002-05:00

I usually like to have a new post up on Monday, but I probably won't be blogging till later in the week since I have another set of job interviews. They're callbacks from the interviews from a few weeks ago, so I'm optimistic that something will come through and I can stop posting these notices...

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (60-51)

2009-11-06T07:12:00.000-05:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

60. Beck - Lost Cause

59. Jem - They

58. Of Montreal - Disconnect the Dots

Kevin Barnes, the mastermind of Of Montreal, has said he doesn't understand why people compare them to the Beach Boys. What do you think?

57. Jenny Lewis - Black Sand

56. Regina Spektor - Samson

55. Spoon - The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine

54. Hot Chip - Ready for the Floor

I can't tell if this amazing video makes the song seem better than it is, or if the song is actually better than it seems because the video distracts from the music. Either way, I can't stop watching this.

53. The Futureheads - Skip to the End

52. Green Day - Boulevard of Broken Dreams

51. Adele - Cold Shoulder

There's also an unplugged version here.

Why does America have so many more premature births than Europe?

2009-11-04T10:12:00.000-05:00

"Premature births are the chief reason the U.S. ranks 30th in the world in infant mortality, with a rate more than twice as high as infant mortality rates in Sweden, Japan, Finland, Norway and the Czech Republic."

The AP lists possible reasons suggested by "experts":

-Fertility treatments and other forms of assisted reproduction probably play a role because they often lead to twins, triplets or other multiple births. Those children tend to be delivered early.

-The U.S. health care system doesn't guarantees [sic] prenatal care to pregnant women, particularly the uninsured, said Dr. Alan R. Fleischman, medical director for the March of Dimes.

-Maternal obesity and smoking have been linked to premature births and may also be a factor.

-Health officials are also concerned that doctors increasingly are inducing labor or performing C-sections before the 37th week. However, Fleischman said most infant deaths do not occur in babies just shy of 37 weeks gestation, but rather in those much younger....

While "smoking" makes sense as one of the factors causing premature births in the US, it doesn't make sense as an explanation of why America has more premature births than Europe. Europeans smoke much more than Americans, and I'd assume there's a direct correlation between a country's overall smoking rate and the prevalence of pregnant women smoking. There must be factors aside from smoking that are so harmful to babies that they go even further than canceling out America's advantage in having relatively few smokers.

Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten says "hooray" to his colleagues' getting into a fistfight.

2009-11-03T12:54:00.001-05:00

"Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story."

(Here's the backstory.)

Via Metafilter, where one commenter asks:

What the ---- is with this glorification of workplace violence?

This makes me long for the days before advertisers had a finely honed understanding of how to manipulate the public.

2009-11-03T08:34:00.001-05:00

"I have made a chemical analysis of Sozodont for the Teeth, and find nothing injurious or objectionable in its composition."

(Here's the original source.)

It's an 1898 ad highlighted on Living in a Golden Age, a blog by "Jason (the commenter)," who's also a frequent commenter here. I recommend bookmarking the blog if you enjoy such pre-modern cultural items.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (70-61)

2009-10-30T07:23:00.012-04:00

(Click here for the whole list.)

70. Goldfrapp - Happiness

69. The Darkness - I Believe in a Thing Called Love

68. Iron & Wine - On Your Wings

67. Death Cab for Cutie - The New Year

66. Locksley - Don't Make Me Wait

(Full disclosure: I know the guys from high school.)

65. Okkervil River - Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe

64. Rilo Kiley - I Never

Sorry about the poor quality of this clip, but I'm including it to give a rough idea of what the song is like. You can listen to the album version here on imeem.com with free registration.

63. Radiohead - Nude

62. Alicia Keys - You Don't Know My Name

The "Just My Imagination" of the '00s.

(Video here.)

61. MGMT - The Youth