The Royal We were on the South Side of Pittsburgh last night for, in the words of an associate, "the city's classier riots" post-Super Bowl. Good fun. Interesting to watch a mob dismantle the transportation system in reaction to a football game. Highlights included the group of people who halted and then climbed on top of the 51C bus as the driver watched in horror. The extra fun came with the subsequent realization that the happy fans surrounding the bus were trying to tip it over. They failed, but still -- why? I guess the answer is: Why not? (Here are Nate's excellent photos of the Steelers Super Bowl celebration in Lawrenceville. Nearly identical to South Side. Notice the police-to-citizen ratio.)
Anyway, We are a bit hung over this morning and reading various stuffs with a syrupy-strong cup of coffee. Here's what:
1) "What Women Want"
"Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of terrain as complex as women’s desire. But Chivers, with plenty of self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture?"
2) "What makes the West strong"
"Citizenship is precisely not a form of brotherhood, of the kind that follows from a shared act of heartfelt submission: it is a relation among strangers, a collective apartness, in which fulfillment and meaning are confined to the private sphere. To have created this form of renewable loneliness is the great achievement of Western civilization, and my way of describing it raises the question of whether it is worth defending and, if so, how."
"In almost any discussion of world affairs, there is one thing on which doves and hawks invariably agree: much more needs to be done to shore up states that are failing, in a state of collapse, or so poor that they are heading in that direction."
Also, sort of related to that, there's The Braddock Story, which keeps getting written. I myself wrote this same story (careful, that's a PDF) a few years back. At the moment I'm delighted by how the Web reshapes the story's finer implications; check out this aggregator's headline ("GENTRIFYING BRADDOCK - hipster real estate speculator becomes mayor of abandoned Pennsylvania steel town - and makes moves to transform it into an upscale suburb for affluent artists"). I don't necessarily agree with the insinuation, but I think it's worth considering. Also worth considering: If Fetterman is in fact a gentrifying "hipster real estate speculator," is that necessarily bad? Some argue it's not.