heh! this is funny...

New Republic reporter Mike Crowley wrote a profile of Michael Crichton for an issue of TNR in March this year. Apparently, Crichton didn't like it -- and guess how he responded? Well, in his latest novel Next, Crichton has a character, "Mick Crowley", who -- well, I'll simply quote the passage:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

LOL. So not only does Mick Crowley sodomize two-year old boys, he also has a small penis. Isn't that funny? Like a double-sledgehammer? You could imagine Crichton going, ok, what's the worst I can do to Crowley? A child-molester, aah, yes. Of a two-year old. Yessss. But surely, nothing could be more damaging to a man than the size of his penis?

Gawd, I've only read one Crichton novel in my life (Airframe, and it wasn't too bad) but I sure as hell feel like reading him after this. The guy is just awesome!

Janet Maslin's review of Next here.

UPDATE: I read the Crowley profile and I must say, it's not the most flattering. But I was surprised at how nakedly polemical Crichton's books have been. Rising Sun, I'm told, actually played into the paranoia in the US in the early 90s about Japan's evil intentions (I once saw the beginning of that movie, but couldn't watch beyond a few minutes). Airframe, which I have read has caustic comments on the media, Disclosure was a perverse take on feminism and sexual harassment and of course, everyone knows about State of Fear and global warming. Here's Crowley:

You can read these books in search of an ideology, but you won't find a distinct one. Clearly, Crichton is no liberal (although he argues that one of his earliest books, A Case of Need, did have a pro-abortion rights message). But a free-market conservative wouldn't write an essentially protectionist book like Rising Sun, either. What Crichton's worldview really amounts to is a kind of hectoring contrarianism that is increasingly targeted at America's know-it-alls, against the liberal elites, against the very type of expertise that had given him his professional cachet. And that worldview has reached its bitter, frothing apex with State of Fear.

Anti-expert, is what Crichton is. That does make a twisted kind of sense. But more on that, some other time.

i reserve judgement

New York magazine says that Julianne Moore sucks in her Broadway debut Vertical Hour.

I dunno, I'll reserve judgement until I see the play. I'm a big admirer of Moore's performances -- Far from Heaven, The End of the Affair, Vanya on 42nd St, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, A Map of the World -- and I've never watched Far from Heaven or The End of the Affair without a lump in my throat (and I've watched them many times). So yeah, I'll just see the damn play and decide for myself.

The play, from all accounts, seems to be another David Hare screed on Iraq. Oh well.

Ben Brantley of the New York Times says pretty much the same thing.

Well, I still reserve judgement.

Dear Economist

I just love the Financial Times!!

Natasha asks:

Dear Economist,

I have been going out with a school friend for nearly a year and I think he’s “the one” - but we are heading off to university at opposite ends of the country. Will the relationship survive? Is there anything I can do to keep it going?

Yours sincerely,

Natasha, Co. Durham

The economist replies:

Dear Natasha,

I understand your concern, but your future looks bright. A long-distance relationship will always put pressure on both of you, but it’s a question of how you use that to your advantage.

Economist Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, has pointed out that the Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any long-distance relationship.

The theorem, briefly, implies that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice-versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine. Similarly, there is no point in travelling to see your boyfriend for a take-away Indian meal and an evening in front of the telly. To justify the trip’s fixed costs, you will require champagne, sparkling conversation and energetic sex. Insist on it.

Meanwhile, optimal- experimentation theory suggests that at this tender stage of life you are highly likely to meet someone even better. Socialise a lot while your boyfriend is not around.

Finally, consider your bargaining strength with potential new boyfriends with regard to, for instance, who pays for dinner. Your best alternative to a negotiated agreement with the new boyfriend is. your old boyfriend, who by your admission is an excellent catch.

This puts you in a sound negotiating position - unless, of course, the boy is maintaining a long-distance relationship of his own.

Daniel Craig, RIP

(No, no, he isn't dead but read on...)

Consider this. There's this obscure and, a not-so-popular one that you think makes great music. You are, in other words, a fan. And then suddenly, this band gets a hit, a chart-topping single and all of a sudden, is the toast of the world. Your friends, who, a day before, wouldn't even have heard of this band are now giddy fans. How would you feel? Happy for the band? Sad? Sad and happy? Bitter-sweet? All of the above?

When it was announced that Ang Lee would direct Brokeback Mountain, most of us who'd read Annie Proulx's short story felt a nice sensation inside: this would be good, we thought. It was better. Commercially, the film did better than anyone expected; best, it became a sensation and Lee won a well-deserved Oscar. Now of course it was everyone's, everyone appreciated it; and it was ours no longer. Overall, not a bad state of affairs too (although I have serious reservations about the way the film was marketed/perceived).

Its deja vu time today as Casino Royale comes out in theaters, with its star attraction, the new James Bond: Daniel Craig. I guess I am one of the few people who've seen many of Craig's films: the harrowing The Mother, the so-so Sylvia, and smashing-good-times Enduring Love and Layer Cake. Plus he was in Spielberg's Munich (proof that his star was rising, I'd say) and the more recent Truman Capote biopic Infamous (which I have yet to see).

What can I say? The man is a brilliant actor, who seems to internalize every character he plays. But more than that, he's an astonishingly feral presence in any movie. Craig is the kind of actor whose sheer physicality -- I was almost going to say animalness -- hits you in the face, even when he's behind the movie screen, enough to make a frission of excitement run down your spine. (The only other actor today who comes close in doing this is Clive Owen -- and to a much lesser extent, Russell Crowe). Craig is like a tightly coiled tiger and his vulnerability (when he shows it) only underscores his lethalness; even when he's down, you only feel sorry for the other guy, because you know that Craig can't be kept down.

If all this resembles how a giddy school-girl might sound, then that just proves how Craig's charms can get though even the most battle-hardened critics (for the record, I consider myself movie-hardened). Most female critics, revewing Casino Royale have outdone themselves -- and I'm not being pejorative -- in describing the Daniel Craig-effect. Here's the relatively restrained Manohla Dargis (who, being what she is, simply cannot take out that note of sweeping dismissal from her voice) talking about Craig in the Times:

attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig ... You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too);...

Sarah Lyall's feature in the Times is even more giddy, it comes replete with admiring references to Craig's torso. One would have thought that this kind of reporting was beneath the Times (No, wait, I was joking, of course it isn't -- remember this article?) but that's Daniel Craig for you.

The crowning achievement is Dana Steven's piece in Slate -- it has a starting paragraph that made me gasp, even as I started to laugh, referring to a certain orifice in Craig's body and what it might be capable of holding. But no, read it for yourself; it's worth reading, with an inevitable paragraph or two on Craig's torso (again, what can I say? that's Daniel Craig for you), it also nicely summarizes his other work. You might want to check them out; for all the chemical reactions he seems to arouse in people, Craig really is a darn good actor.

Which finally brings me back to the epitaph I titled this post with. A year ago, Daniel Craig was the property of a few people, who'd seen and admired his other films, now he's ours no longer. As James Bond -- and now an acclaimed one, so more Bond roles will surely follow -- he's well on his way to being a movie star and god only knows, he deserves to be one.

milton friedman

From Brad DeLong's obituary for Milton Friedman (who died yesterday):

Gen. William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea of phasing out the draft and putting only volunteers in uniform, saying that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries." Friedman, a member of the 15-person commission, interrupted him. "General," Friedman asked, "would you rather command an army of slaves?" Westmoreland got angry: "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." And Friedman got rolling: "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries." And he did not stop: " If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general. We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher." As George Shultz liked to say: "Everybody loves to argue with Milton, particularly when he isn't there."

Via Indian Economy Blog, two reports that Friedman wrote on India are here and here. The first is a memorandum to the Government of India recommending certain policies, the latter -- particularly prescient -- is Friedman's critique of India's Planning model. He makes, for me, two interesting points. The first is that Planning, especially the Soviet model that India followed, could only have worked in an authoritiarian top-down society, like Russia's or China's, not in a democracy-with-private-property like India. More than that:

Though Indian economic planning is cut to the Russian pattern, it operates in a different economic and political structure. Agricultural land is almost entirely privately owned and operated; so are most trading and industrial enterprises. However, the government does own and operate many important industrial undertakings in a wide variety of fields-from railroads and air transport to steel mils, coal mines, fertilizer factories, machine tool plants, and retail establishments; Parliament has explicitly adopted “the socialist pattern of society” as the objective of economic and social policy; a long list of industries have been explicitly reserved to
the “public sector” for future development, and the successive plans have allocated to public sector investment a wholly disproportionate part of total investment - in the third five-year plan, 60 percent although the public sector accounts at present for not much more that a tenth of total income generated. In addition, the government exercises important controls over the private sector: no substantial enterprise can be established without an “industrial” license from the government, existing firms must get government allocations of foreign exchange and also of domestic products in the public sector; and so on in endless variety.

The difference between India and Russia in political structure is at the moment even sharper that in economic structure. The British left parliamentary democracy and respect for civil rights as a very real heritage to India. Though I very much fear that this heritage is being undermined and weakened, as of the moment it is still very strong indeed. There is tolerance of wide range of opinion, free discussion, open opposition by organized political parties, and judicial protection of individual civil rights-except for recent emergency actions under the Defence of India Act. The kind of centralized economic planning India has adopted can enable a strong authoritarian government to extract a high fraction of the aggregate output the people for governmental purposes - Russia is a prime current example and China, though we know much less about her, may be another; Egypt under the Pharaohs is a more ancient example. This is one way, and I believe almost the only way, in which such a system can foster economic growth-if the resources extracted are indeed used for productive capital investment rather than for arms or governments. But this advantage- if advantage it be - of centralized economic planning, India is not able to obtain precisely because of the difference between its economic and political structure and those of Russia or China.

And then, he hits on what exactly makes a strong state (without any checks and balances) dangerous: the contrast between what he calls (tweaking John Kenneth Galbraith's phrase) public affluence and private squalor.

Whether because of the adoption of the Russian model of economic planning or for other reasons. Russia and India have one feature in common that strongly impresses the casual visitor. In both, if I may pervert a phrase made famous by our present Ambassador to India, there is a striking contrast between public affluence and private squalor. In both countries, whenever one sees a magnificent structure, newly built or well maintained, the odds are heavy that it is governmental. If some activity is luxuriously financed and well provided for, the odds are that is governmentally sponsored. The city in India which showed the most striking improvement since my earlier visit was New Delhi, with impressive new governmental buildings, residence and luxury hotels. I should add that although the public affluence is not notably different in the two countries, the private squalor is much worse in India than in Russia.

This strikes me as true even today, as high-rises and shopping malls in Indian metropolises co-exist side by side with slums and all the combined miseries on this earth. Friedman's critique of India's "mixed" economic model makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure that we had any alternative in those days after Independence. I interpret his point as one of efficiency: even as the State in India grew and grew and reached monstrous proportions (emplyoying, I believe, more than 50% of the working population), no effort was expended in making it more efficient. Regulation can work, and developing societies need regulation in order that they not make the same mistakes that today's industrialized economies made when they were in the throes of the industrial revolution and unfettered capitalism. But regulation also needs efficient institutions (and an efficient Government) in order to make it work and in order that it can encourage economic growth, which is what any free society needs.

I'll go on and quote Friedman's last sentence, almost eerily prescient, and without fifty years of hindsight:

It will, I fear, take a major political or economic crisis to produce a substantial change in the course on which India is no set in economic policy, and I am not at all optimistic that such a crisis if it occurs, will produce a shift toward greater freedom rather than toward greater authoritarianism.

There was indeed a major economic crisis and it did provoke change (reversal is a better word) in economic policy, but I'm happy to say that so far at least, we seem to have come out of it fine. What happens ahead is, of course, no one really knows.