Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

July 2, 2009

site weirdness

Filed under: Nuts and bolts, Ramble — Peter @ 9:58 pm

I’m updating the template over the next few days, so if your feed does weird things, I apologize in advance. See ya on the other side of it.

June 28, 2009

on cultural and political change reporting in NYT

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:13 am

I’m not an expert on political change. But this article in the NYT claiming that “even as cultural acceptance of homosexuality increases across the country, the politics of gay rights remains full of crosscurrents” strikes me as insane, for two reason. First, that someone could be short-sighted enough to think that a decade of change, backlash, sometimes-acceptance, and sometimes-hidden deep animosity to LGBT communities means ‘cultural acceptance’ is stupid. And second, to believe that the politics haven’t changed is stupid.

In fact, I would suggest that the whole article is written as a process piece meant to goad the Obama administration into a public fight with the LGBT community, because it would be fun to watch for political reporters and would allow political opponents to point to (probably real) rifts in the Democratic party. It would also allow those who would prefer to rid the world of pesky gay people to continue to oppose political change without being openly accused of being homophobic.

June 26, 2009

wtf, Burger King?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:57 pm

Sometimes a burger is just a penis.

May 19, 2009

Now that the semester is over, I can admit it

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:39 am

update: had to take this down for sanity reasons…

Sadly, I’m squarely in the uncanny valley.

April 29, 2009

Song #3 for last day of class

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:40 am

I play music for my students while they fill out evals. In honor of the fact that, in the end, I don’t know squat about the lives of 20-something women, I like to include something that I find inexplicable that the kids are listening to. So, natch, Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend:

Song #2 from last day of class

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:20 am

I give students music for evals. Here’s number 2, from Sigur Ros (It translates to ‘Within me a Lunatic Sings):

Last day of class, part one

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:11 am

I always give my students music to listen to while filling out evaluations. Here’s on tap for today:

This song is from this album, incidentally. If you don’t feel like dancing, you can always relax and let Buddha take you away.

Highlights: at the 2:54 mark, you can see the highest guy in the place in the lower right corner. And at 4:05, the song just becomes brilliant.

April 28, 2009

Frankie Manning

Filed under: Culture, Ramble — Peter @ 9:19 am

Frankie Manning died yesterday, April 27th. He was a month shy of his 95th birthday. There were (and are) celebrations planned, which will now become memorials.

My partner and I started taking swing lessons a good 7-8 years ago, and we’ve probably taken a few workshops a year since then. We go dancing occasionally (a couple weeks ago, last). We’re not great, but it’s great fun, and a good 8-count lindy swing out is one of the great feelings of cute-and-cool on the dance floor.

Go out and dance a little, ok?

April 25, 2009

Depressing NYT, Refreshing Theses

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:57 pm

Here’s a screenshot of the NYT right this moment:

Somehow the combination of Maude’s death, the impending flu epidemic (if not now, soon), continued immigration sadness, the professor suspected in shooting, Iraq still slow-disintegrating, and the incredibly depressing potential re-rise of the monied financial classes. It makes me want to just throw up my hands or hide under a pillow.

Luckily I’ve got my thesis students’ final products to console me. At Barnard, we do this every year, a full-year project where students are encouraged to move from consumers to producers of knowledge. I’m exhausted by this, but very proud of all of them. This year was special in that I managed 9 theses, way more than I would consider good for anyone. I spent a good 10 hours a week on average with these students, between individual meetings, reading and commenting, advising, cajoling. And the last few weeks have nearly broken me.

But here they are:

1. An comparative analysis of images of women in Seventeen magazine images (1958, 1980, 2008)
2. A critical examination of the DSM and the means by which practitioners diagnose eating disorders
3. A study of organizational decoupling in high- and low-performing public and charter schools in NYC
4. A survey analysis of self-image and dieting/exercise patterns of college women
5. An analysis of the institutional bases of diaspora identity, using the case of Armenians in the Northeast
6. A study of 2nd generation Chinese immigrants and the ways they use social institutions in college to integrate into the US and maintain Chinese identity
7. An examination of how technology changes the authoritative use of media, with a focus on the internet and a quantitative study of Twitter
8. A James March-inspired study of high-stakes, high-ambiguity decision making, namely how college seniors manage the work of deciding what to do post-college.
9. And, a study of how midwives are differentially able to manage their ideologies of women’s empowerment in the context of the medicalization of pregnancy.

Good for you, Barnard sociology women. Good for you.

April 20, 2009

frauds?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:03 pm

A little information needed, please. How many of you at one point or another were paralyzed from writing and/or posting something on account of feeling like a total fraud? Does having a blog change this, or exacerbate it?

April 16, 2009

good riddance

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:32 am

Dear Gov. Perry,
Try not to let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

love,
Peter

April 8, 2009

All right! Stop whatcha doin’ ’cause I’m about to ruin the image and the style that ya used to.

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 10:29 pm

I don’t know why I’m in this kind of mood, but wow. In the breathtaking sense.

btw, the Humpty Dance is your chance to do the hump.

April 6, 2009

snacky

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:55 pm

I’ve been trying to figure out how to pick just one from here, but in the end I just couldn’t.

March 31, 2009

feeling sluggish

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:50 am

I’ve been feeling the blogging valley, which might explain the lack of posts round this place. I’m sure it’ll pick up again when, you know, something worth saying becomes worth saying. Nothing dire.

March 11, 2009

reclaiming prose

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:45 pm

I’ve always enjoyed Roy Batty’s last lines from Blade Runner:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

It seems to me that in my life I used to be more prosaic. I used to care more about words than I do now. Nowadays I care a lot about ideas, discussion, debate, but less about expression. Searching for some new places, I ran across Mandy Brown’s Working Library, and I have really enjoyed perusing its archives. The work is thoughtful and well-written.

I am trying. I purchased an old typewriter a bit back, and I’ve been typing letters to friends. The experience slows down the whole communication process, and while it has not made me better with words, it has certainly made me more thoughtful. But I fear something about using words well is gone and lost in my personality. The typing experience feels like the frivolity of email, paired with the inconvenience of time-lag and cost of a stamp.

March 10, 2009

Help! What should I be reading?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 10:24 pm

I’m prowling for some new websites, any thoughts? I’m hoping for something substantive rather that process-y (not ‘about academia’ or about politics-as-opposed-to-policy). Otherwise, money, tech, culture, politics, economics, design, art, more more more.

March 2, 2009

Sociological concern trolling, or why orgtheory is moving off my radar

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:30 pm

Thanks Fabio, you’re doing great. I’m totally on board with the strong ‘we’ and the earnest concern about the incoherence of sociology. I’m looking forward to the next posts about how we really need to spend more time defining institutions and resolving the structure/agency problem.

Now that’s a research program

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:48 pm

Dan makes an excellent observation:

Now, in my pre-2008 experience, I’d possibly be on board, debating the staleness/salmonella trade-offs. But then, two days after my birthday, something happened. Something big. And that was the New York Times’ cookie recipe.

See, the key is a giant cookie, big chocolate chips, and then there’s this:

Given the opportunity to riff on his cookie-making strategies, Mr. Rubin…lets the dough rest for 36 hours before baking…

To put the technique to the test, one batch of the cookie dough recipe given here was allowed to rest in the refrigerator. After 12, 24, and 36 hours, a portion was baked, each time on the same sheet pan, lined with the same nonstick sheet in the same oven at the same temperature.

At 12 hours, the dough had become drier and the baked cookies had a pleasant, if not slightly pale, complexion. The 24-hour mark is where things started getting interesting. The cookies browned more evenly and looked like handsomer, more tanned older brothers of the younger batch. The biggest difference, though, was flavor. The second batch was richer, with more bass notes of caramel and hints of toffee.

Going the full distance seemed to have the greatest impact. At 36 hours, the dough was significantly drier than the 12-hour batch; it crumbled a bit when poked but held together well when shaped. These cookies baked up the most evenly and were a deeper shade of brown than their predecessors. Surprisingly, they had an even richer, more sophisticated taste, with stronger toffee hints and a definite brown sugar presence. At an informal tasting, made up of a panel of self-described chipper fanatics, these mature cookies won, hands down.

Through careful empirical confirmatory experimentation, I’ve found that it’s a runaway by 36 hours:

Thus endeth the lesson.

February 19, 2009

A pedagogical aside

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:00 pm

My undergraduate class mostly self-hosted a really terrific (in my opinion, I don’t know if they thought so) discussion of Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent and Karen Hossfeld’s “‘Their Logic Against Them’: Contradictions in sex, race and class on the Silicon Valley shop floor.” (a chapter in Ward’s 1990 Women Workers and Global Restructuring). They mobilized Burawoy’s discussion of the relative autonomy of the labor process, strategized about what constitutes resistance and change in the workplace, confronted big and small questions with attention to readings and real-life consideration. Overall, very satisfying. Thank you, CU/Barnard community.

Ok, now back to giving Fabian the response he deserves on this.

February 17, 2009

Presidential snark

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:06 pm

I think this is a way to do it, though I would be annoyed to no end if I didn’t agree with the president’s position. It comes off the White House blog, a photo slideshow of the stimulus bill’s process, told in photos from the presidential perspective:

Jan. 27, 2009: House Republicans surround the President after the meeting. Many of them were seeking his autograph. Every House Republican eventually voted against the bill.

*update* You know, the more I look at this, the more devastating it seems to me to be. Here is photographic evidence of the president bending over backwards to be reasonable to all sides, take into account varied positions, listen, argue, and work through a complicated and contentious bill. And as one of the captions (completely understated) notes (photo 12, with Susan Collins) that she was one of 3 Republicans who voted for it.