It’s weird to talk about “the best show on TV” now that The Sopranos and The Wire are off the air, and the end of Battlestar Galactica brings that particular third-way contrarian option to a close.

There’s the old Yeats joke; when Swinburne died, WBY said, “Now I’m king of the cats” — and he was (probably) for the next thirty years. It’s strange now that the new king of cats might actually be on broadcast TV rather than cable — but Mad Men aside, that’s where we seem to be — and there are a LOT of genuinely ambitious network shows out there.

Rex makes the case for Dollhouse, which has indeed picked up. If you were (figuratively) buying stock in a show, it’d be a hot bet. But I’m going to stick with Lost in the drama category (no one does it like you), 30 Rock for character-based comedy (Liz Lemon is our decade’s female answer to Homer Simpson), and The Daily Show/The Colbert Report hour for sheer cultural relevance — simply put, nothing else is essential.

Sorry if those answers seem boring, but that’s just how it is sometimes.

A.O. Scott on the new Neorealism in American cinema:

WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It

When I first heard that Sopranos creator David Chase was making an HBO miniseries about the movie business, I thought it would be a roman a clef or something entertaining but insidery like The Player or “Entourage.” But this actually sounds pretty cool:

The series, “Ribbon of Dreams,” will begin with the behind-the-scenes roles played by two fictional characters — one a cowboy with some violence in his past, the other a mechanical engineer — who work for the famous early film director D. W. Griffith. It will follow them and their professional heirs through the development of the movie business.

The project is expected to cover each period of Hollywood movies, beginning with silent westerns and comedies, through the golden era of the studio system, to the emergence of auteur film directors in the 1970s, and up to the current mix of studio blockbusters and independent films. The cast of characters will also include many of the biggest names of Hollywood’s past, including John Wayne and Bette Davis

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I love this stuff, and I bet I will be very into this.

About three years ago, Robin noticed a strange phrase making the rounds in political talk about the costs of the Iraq war: “blood and treasure.” I’d noticed it too, and when he posted about it, I started to do some digging into its origins. I thought that it would be a nice tidy little search, make for a fun thread and discussion, and we’d figure out that it came from Washington, maybe, or Lincoln, or Clausewitz.

As it turned out, I spent the better part of a year trying to find out where “blood and treasure” came from. I exhausted databases. I learned languages. I asked everyone I knew about it. I gave lectures on it. I contemplated scrapping my planned dissertation to write about it instead, and when that seemed like a bad idea, I contemplated leaving graduate school to write a book about it instead.

“Blood and treasure” is in its own way the key to all mythologies. Tracing the phrase traces the history of human thought about violence, whether in politics, history, religion, philosophy, or literature. I wanted to share here a fraction of what I have found so far.

Read more…

You Know It’s Bad When …:

Insurance companies say they have no choice but to honor contracts, and banks are pleading that their assets will be worth more if you just give them a little time.

For anyone, especially in business, who has tried to make those same arguments to insurers and bankers, to no avail, it’s painfully rich.

Sparta had a great army, lots of places had great olive oil, and plenty of city-states had plebiscite democracy. So why was life in Athens so great?

[Josiah] Ober’s hypothesis is that Athens’s participatory institutions essentially turned the city into a knowledge-generating and knowledge-aggregating machine, and also supported the effective deployment of useful knowledge over time. Athenian institutions and culture functioned so that the right useful knowledge made it to the right people at the right time, resulting in the production of consistently better-than-average decisions. Athenian institutions and culture also functioned to provide an effective balance between innovation, on the one hand, and, on the other, learning or routinization, which brings efficiency. To overcome the problem of dispersed and latent knowledge, the Athenians used “networking and teaming.” To overcome alignment problems, they built up stores of common knowledge through extensive publicity mechanisms and an emphasis on “interpresence”–frequent and large public gatherings–and “intervisibility” in public spaces, the capacity of all members of an audience to see each other as well as the speaker; and these stores of common knowledge worked particularly well to sustain systems of reward and sanction able to motivate ordinary citizens. To minimize transaction costs in areas such as trade, they standardized rules and exchanged practices and widely disseminated knowledge about them. The Athenians invested more resources than did their competitors in ensuring that their laws did not contradict each other, and in archiving and widely publishing final versions.

One particular example that the reviewer Danielle Allen (aka The Smartest Classicist I Know) examines is a ship-building competition authorized by the citizens of Athens: not only did public competitions like these encourage innovation in building, but since they were publicly judged, they helped disseminate expert knowledge throughout the populace, as the people learned what made one ship better than another.

Allen also looks long at what lessons American democracy can learn from Athens; one big (if obvious) conclusion is that the polis is a lot more nimble than an empire or even a republic, but from the interconnected micropolitical structures of the polis, one might actually be able to sustain a the macropolitics of a democratic republic:

As Ober notes, the immediate usefulness of the Athenian model pertains not directly to nation-states that are vastly larger than the city-state of Athens, with its population of approximately 250,000, but to the wide variety of smaller scale organizations that make up the sub-units of any given nation-state. To unleash the full value of participatory democracy at the level of the nation-state, a citizenry would do best to focus on tapping participatory democracy at the local level and throughout the variety of organizational types that make up modern society. Then there would be the further question of how well each of these sub-units is connected to the rest. If participatory democratic practices on a smaller scale and in various contexts do indeed increase the knowledge resources of the citizenry of a nation-state as a whole, then the structures of representative government, too, should function better.

It’s a very Athenian conclusion, that democracy is a function of knowledge (and vice versa), but I think it’s a welcome one.

Clive Thompson on Etsy, microbusiness, and personalized aesthetics.

David Frum, Christopher Shea, and Scott Horton look at Glenn Beck and say, yep, here we go.