It’s weird to read what seem like round after round of articles talking up the importance of the potato in shaping modernity (mostly by way of jacking up population numbers). To me, at least, this is old news.

Ten years ago, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher had a cracking book chapter in Practicing New Historicism called “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination.” It mostly looks at debates in the late 18th and early 19th centuries about potato farming (including such luminaries as Gladstone, William Cobbett, Arthur Young, and of course Thomas Malthus). It was definitely clear then that potatoes allowed you to support a vast population of tenant farmers for fractions of what it cost before, when most peasants ate bread.

The other concern was that compared to bread, the potato was antisocial — there was no structured division of labor, no fusion of foods from different subagricultures (i.e. wheat and eggs). You could just dig them out of the ground and boil them — the first MRE (besides cheese). Greenblatt and Gallagher also focus on how the fears of overpopulation were driven by the production of the potato itself — critics imagined dumb, zombie-like potato people rising up directly from the ground. Unstoppable. Like a tidal wave. “The potato is the root of misery BECAUSE it is the root of plenty.”

It’s worth noting in the context of our current anxieties about food monocultures how, for much of human history, the vast majority of human beings were sustained by a single food item. Bread, potatoes — the assumption was that you would eat one kind of food, which would supply your whole nourishment. This, of course, is what made crop failures and famines so deadly. Potatoes, since they grew underground, were thought to be immune from the usual agents of famine – an invincible wonderfood.

This wasn’t just a problem in England and Ireland. Between Malthus and Greenblatt/Gallagher comes the great sociologist Max Weber. Weber’s first substantial work, written not long before The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was the lecture “The Nation-State and Economic Policy,” where Weber criticized the wealthy Prussian landowners for systematically replacing the local peasants with immigrant Polish workers. The Polish workers were cheaper largely because they were willing to raise and live on potatoes alone, where the established tenants would not. Potatoes then became the means to establish new relationships of domination in the absence of the traditional set of mutual obligations that governed peasants and landowners in the feudal period.

Weber’s work on the Polish farmers is important because it shows (I think) that he realized that modernity was not only about his legendary middle-class Protestants, so anxious to prove that they are among the elect that they work long after they’ve satisfied their basic needs, but also about these exploited, bare-subsistence workers. Both in their own way exploded social traditions. But while one group came to dominate economic, political, and intellectual life, the other slowly grew, the invisible material substrate, working to feed all of those diligent bourgeois toiling in their vocations.

“Does the Brain Like E-Books?” sounds and reads too much like a Snarkmarket original to be ignored. I like this bit from my friend and almost-colleague (if I had locked down that UCSB job) Alan Liu:

Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

And I adore this closer look at the cognitive implications of reading, as relayed by Jonah Lehrer:

I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading “routinized, familiar passages” a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It’s the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.

But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we’re reading prose that is “unfamiliar”. (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.

That’s right — Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” actually pushes through to a different part of your brain — because it taps into new graphic possibilities, as well as semantic (and syntactic) ones. And that, my friends, is poetry — i.e. “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

Or it is, so long as we keep making it new:

The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don’t feel as “effortless” or “automatic” as old-fashioned books. But here’s the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.

Or today’s graphic avant-garde will feel as easy as tomorrow’s MOR pleasures.

Think about a newspaper – so much potential for marginal distraction! All those graphic collisions of text upon itself, with pictures and advertisements and such, in tiny type and held in an unusual bodily orientation. Then they added color! In the nineteenth century, the newspaper was a sensory onslaught akin to watching the commercials surrounding Saturday morning cartoons. Now, it’s straightforward, orderly — even stately.

There’s a great, probably unintentional allegory of this transformation in Citizen Kane. It plays out as the fossilization of a marriage, and the crystallization of Kane’s political intentions – moving from anarchic gadfly to demagogic gubernatorial candidate – but it’s also about the normalization (and neutralization) of newspaper reading. It goes from marginal distraction to tunnel vision, and in just six moves.

Some goodies from the latest Frank Rich column:

As the economics commentator Jeff Madrick points out in The New York Review of Books, the American public is still owed “a clear account of the financial events of the last two years and of who, if anyone, is seriously to blame.” Without that, there will be neither the comprehensive policy framework nor the political will to change anything.

The only investigation in town is a bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress in May. It is still hiring staff. Its 10 members are dispersed throughout the country, and, according to a spokeswoman, have contemplated only a half-dozen public sessions over the next year. Such a panel, led by the former California state treasurer Phil Angelides, seems highly unlikely to match Congress’s Depression-era Pecora commission. That investigation was driven by a prosecutor whose relentless fact-finding riveted the country and gave birth to the Securities and Exchange Commission, among other New Deal reforms. Last week, we learned that the current S.E.C. has hired a former Goldman hand as the chief operating officer of its enforcement unit.

I’m a little put off by Rich’s overall anti-Goldman, anti-Ivy, bordering-on-a-conspiracy-theory not-quite-populism in this column, but this idea is just right on. I mean, gawd — can you imagine an independent, prosecutor-led investigation into the financial crisis that was as dogged and intense and public as Ken Starr’s investigations of Bill Clinton? Complete with a book like the 9/11 Commission’s? We’ve got Patrick Fitzgerald investigating Blagojevich and… which B-team, exactly, on the global financial crisis?

Come on. Let’s get to the bottom of something. Preferably something real.

I don’t think this Mary Poppins mashup is pitch-perfect. But I do think it’s wonderful:

From Video-Remixes.

There are a lot of things I’m skeptical/pissed about re:the Google Books settlement (and Google Books in general). This, however, strikes me as exactly right:

Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out by June. Edmonds said one of the strengths of Google’s offering was that once bought, the e-book would exist in a “cloud library”, which could be accessed from potentially any device, including laptops, “smart phones” or e-readers. “As long as you can get onto the library, you can access it,” Edmonds said. “All books will live in the same library, so it doesn’t matter where you buy it or where you read it.”

I’m assuming that Google will also use Gears or some other implementation to allow for local storage and offline reading. You’ve got the tools; it’s easy to use them.

I like a lot about this model for e-books in general, but it seems particularly well-suited for Google Books, which is a scanned backlist of books not originally written or designed for digital reading.

NEW e-books, on the other hand, might benefit from some hardware-specific formatting. You can imagine an interactive book that’s designed to be read on the iPhone, or maybe on a Nintendo handheld or something. Not hastily scanned text, but a piece of tailored multimedia.

The short lesson is that if e-book sellers are going to try to lock their content to a particular console, they had damn well better make sure that the design and readability of the book take full advantage of that console. AND that console had better create a hell of an experience reading books. Otherwise the versatility of the screen-agnostic, read-anywhere cloud model just guts whatever competitive value you might offer in throwing up text on a screen.

This is also a lesson to creators – if you don’t want to be a part of the Google Books party, but want to sell e-books, your best bet is to offer something Google Books won’t match: that is, a book that isn’t just scanned/copied text on a blank screen.

This multi-faceted post on security—from physical to digital and back—by Tim Maly is terrific.

The practice of locking the front door baffles me. It seems to me that, if you lock your front door, you are saying you believe that, at some point, someone will come along and jiggle your door-knob. Someone will give it a try. And I just can’t believe that’s the case. I mean, what, do villains just cruise down the block, jiggling door-knobs in sequence? Of course they don’t!

Now, you could say no, that’s not it at all; instead, locking the front door is a ritual we all perform which provides a general assumption of front-door-locked-ness. Almost like vaccination. One person does it, it’s meaningless; everybody does it, it’s a big deal. And also like vaccination because, once everybody does it, you largely get the benefits even if you don’t!

Locking the front door as collective action. Hmm. I still don’t think it makes any sense. I still do it.

The indispensable ProfHacker on how truth begins with fiction in the academy:

Faking it is a crucial way to get anything accomplished. All Many abstracts for conferences or proposals for books or sabbaticals or anything else are written before the project described therein is finished, or sometimes even started. You build a constituency for a new course in part by positing its existence, and then trusting that a successful iteration of it will lead to even more interested students.

Via Andrew Sullivan comes Atlantic colleague Max Fischer, “A Free-Market Case for the Public Option.” I’ll just pull the same graf as Sullivan:

Something like televisions exist in a free market because consumers, if they don’t like any of the new TVs on the market, can simply keep their old one. If they really don’t like the market, they can even forgo owning one altogether; it will make you unpopular on game day, but it won’t risk your life. Insurance is different. Anyone with a sense of basic self-preservation has no choice but to buy health insurance every single month. You cannot opt out, there are few options to choose from, and it’s difficult to know how to price your future risk of injury. So health insurance companies have distorted incentives to innovate or provide a more cost-effective product.

With ordinary goods, the zero-position ownership is acceptable and even virtuous. Not so with health care.

There are a few goods that are similar, like education. You could, under a highly charged set of circumstances, opt out of giving yourself or your child a basic education, and there are many parts of the world where this is not uncommon. Nobody, however, really seems to think that this is a good thing — whether you’re home-schooling, using private education, or sending your kid to a public school, the norm is that your kids ought to get an education. And in industrialized democracies, there’s usually a robust system of public education which (problems and inequalities aside) does a good job of serving most people’s basic needs.

The question is whether the zero-position of health care is something like “ambulance in the event of a gunshot wound” or something more like K-12 education. (I think our views on the zero-position of education are changing too, as access to good pre-K and postsecondary ed look more like defaults rather than extras.)

I’ve written here before about the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius – see here and here. Clay Shirky is into Manutius too – both of those posts trace back to CS. But this post on book publishing and this one on digitization convinced me that everyone needs to know this story, because we need heroes like Manutius today.

This is from Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading (one of my favorite books ever):

In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and many of the Greek scholars who had established schools on the shores of the Bosphorus left for Italy. Venice became the new centre of classical learning. Some forty years later the Italian humanist Aldus Manutius, who had instructed such brilliant students as Pico della Mirandola in Latin and Greek, finding it difficult to teach without scholarly editions of the classics in practical formats, decided to take up Gutenberg’s craft and established a printing-house of his own where he would be able to produce exactly the kind of books he needed for his courses. Aldus chose to establish his press in Venice in order to take advantage of the presence of the displaced Eastern scholars, and probably employed as correctors and compositors other exiles, Cretan refugees who had formerly been scribes.

In 1494 Aldus began his ambitious publishing program, which was to produce some of the most beautiful volumes in the history of printing: first in Greek – Sophocles, Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides – and then in Latin – Virgil, Horace, Ovid. In Aldus’s view, these illustrious authors were to be read “without intermediaries” – in the original tongue, and mostly without annotations or glosses – and to make it possible for readers to “converse freely with the glorious dead” he published grammar books and dictionaries alongside the classical texts.

Not only did he seek the services of local experts , he also invited eminent humanists from all over Europe – including such luminaries as Erasmus of Rotterdam – to stay with him in Venice. Once a day these scholars would meet in Aldus’s house to discuss what titles would be printed and what manuscripts would be used as reliable sources, sifting through the collections of classics established in the previous centuries. “Where medieval humanists accumulated,” noted the historian Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance ones discriminated.”

Aldus discriminated with an unerring eye. To the list of classical writers he added the works of the great Italian poets, Dante and Petrarch among others.

Aldus didn’t just pick great texts (and great people to edit them) – he made great books, introducing several important innovations.

As private libraries grew, readers began to find large volumes not only difficult to handle and uncomfortable to carry, but inconvenient to store. In 1501, confident in the success of his first editions, Aldus responded to readers’ demands and brought out a series of pocket-sized books in octavo – half the size of quarto – elegantly printed and meticulously edited.

To keep down the production cost she decided to print a thousand copies at a time, and to use the page more economically he employed a newly designed type , “italic”, created by the Bolognese punch-cutter Francesco Griffo, who also cut the first roman type in which the capitals were shorter than the ascending (full- height) letters of the lowercase to ensure a better-balanced line. The result was a book that appeared much plainer than the ornate manuscript editions popular throughout the Middle Ages, a volume of elegant sobriety.

What counted above all, for the owner of an Aldine pocket-book, was the text , clearly and eruditely printed – not a preciously decorated object. Griffo’s italic type (first used in a woodcut illustrating a collection of letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, printed in 1500) gracefully drew the reader’s attention to the delicate relationship between letters; according to the modern English critic Sir Francis Meynell, italics slowed down the reader’s eye, “increasing his capacity to absorb the beauty of the text.”

I love that italic type is above all a technology — operating both on the eye (to increase attention) and the page, to decrease the total size of the text and allow more words to be printed on fewer sheets of paper. That in turn allows all of the dimensions to be reduced, saving money and making the books easier to use.

Like all technologies, though, the printed octavo volume in italic type has definite social preconditions AND consequences:

Since these books were cheaper than manuscripts, especially illuminated ones, and since an identical replacement could be purchased if a copy was lost or damaged, they became, in the eyes of the new readers, less symbols of wealth than of intellectual aristocracy, and essential tools for study.

Booksellers and stationers had produced, both in the days of ancient Rome and in the early Middle Ages, books as merchandise to be traded, but the cost and pace of their production weighed upon the readers with a sense of privilege in owning something unique . After Gutenberg, for the first time in history, hundreds of readers possessed identical copies of the same book, and (until a reader gave a volume private markings and a personal history) the book read by someone in Madrid was the same book read by someone in Montpellier.

So successful was Aldus’s enterprise that his editions were soon being imitated throughout Europe: in France by Gryphius in Lyons, as well as Colines and Robert Estienne in Paris, and in The Netherlands by Plantin in Antwerp and Elzevir in Leiden, The Hague, Utrecht and Amsterdam. When Aldus died in 1515, the humanists who attended his funeral erected all around his coffin, like erudite sentinels , the books he had so lovingly chosen to print.

This is, no question, my favorite new genre: the production-as-performance video. This is Pomplamoose’s Single Ladies cover, which is probably the paragon of the form so far:

Characteristics of the pro/per video:

☑ Normal duds, normal environment. No spandex, no fog machine.

☑ Gear. Lots of it.

☑ Subdivision of the video frame: overlapping tracks visualized as overlapping views.

☑ Performance! This isn’t just a hidden camera in the studio. It’s natural, it’s unpretentious—but it’s still a performance.

(In some ways, this newer Pomplamoose video is an even better example of the pro/per form, but the music is not as perfectly ear-tickling, so stick with Single Ladies.)

What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification—which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.

Even live performance videos mystify in their own way: “Jeez, how did they get so good?” What I appreciate about the pro/per, at least in Pomplamoose’s hands, is that it acknowledges: Yes, to make music, you need a lot of tools, and you need a lot of tries. And I really like (maybe even need) the notion that things can be assembled. They can be built from parts, improved piece-by-piece. You don’t have to do it right the first time through. That’s what Pomplamoose seems to be saying, and showing.

I know I’ve seen some other videos in this genre, but I can’t dig any of them up… and, ha ha, searching for “production as performance” on YouTube doesn’t get you anywhere. Can you think of any?