They Know How to Make a Point

From a recent L.A. Times article on the ascendancy of Mandarin over Cantonese in L.A.'s Chinese community and in North America -- I learned something about the difference between the two. I'd known that Chinese is a tonal language, but I hadn't known that while Mandarin has four tones, "so a character can be intonated four ways with four meanings," Cantonese uses a staggering nine tones.

Which gets us to the good part: the comparative expressiveness of Cantonese. As one woman said, "The Italians need body language. We don't need that at all. We have adjectives."

From Cantonese is Losing Its Voice, by David Pierson, January 3, 2006.

On Brokaw's Keen Insight

Readers will recall that it was Tom Brokaw's great good luck as a journalist, as a reporter of news, to uncover that back in the 1930s and 1940s, a large mass of young Americans had to suffer, a) the trials and deprivations of the Great Depression, then b) fight a terrible war —a “world war” in the parlance of the time—against countries bent on global domination. Not only did Brokaw have the courage to bring to light this virtually hidden chapter of our history, but he or an associate had the marketing savvy to title the book The Greatest Generation, an irresistibly flattering phrase which sustained the book through many printings and multiple sequels.

--From a review of "The Greater Generation" by Leonard Steinhorn. Jamie Malanowski, "The Aging of Aquarius," Washington Monthly, January 2006.

"P" is for "Pungent"

"I almost never read the editorials, following the advice of the journalist Jack Germond who once compared the writing of a newspaper editorial to wetting oneself in a dark-blue serge suit: 'It gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody notices.'”

-- from Joseph Epstein’s otherwise predictable diatribe against newspapers, “Are Newspapers Doomed?” in *Commentary* magazine.

Why Do Supreme Court Justices Move to the Left?

The following quotation is taken from an interesting article on the judiciary generally, and on the tendency of Supreme Court justices to become more moderate and even left-leaning over time. It gives hope, but also implies reasons why the most recent appointees, like Scalia and Thomas, might remain as doctrinaire. This quote talks about a recent development that's affecting the independence of judges in the state courts, namely campaign contributions. Both unsurprising and scary:

"There is also recent evidence that state courts to which judges are elected rather than appointed have been powerfully transformed by campaign financing. A study by Texans for Public Justice, for example, found that the ten Texas Supreme Court justices elected or reelected between 1994 and 1998 raised over half of their $12.8 million in campaign money “from lawyers, law firms and litigants who filed appeals with the high court during this same period.” The study also found that, although the Texas Supreme Court declines to hear nearly 90 percent of the cases for which appeal petitions are filed, “the more money that a petitioner contributed to the justices, the more likely they were to accept a given petition.” For example, the court was ten times more likely to accept the petitions from petitioners who made campaign contributions of more than $250,000 than they were of those of non-contributing petitioners. Trends in decisions have also shifted over the same time period decidedly in favor of corporate defendants, and it seems likely that a major factor in that drift is the lack of the same independence-bolstering structures enjoyed by judges in the federal system."

--From "The Drifters: why the Supreme Court makes justices more liberal," by Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado. In The Boston Review, January/February 2006.

So THAT Explains It!

In a review of James English’s “The Economy of Prestige,” Louis Menand writes:

“When the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme, in 1901, the choice was regarded as a scandal, since Leo Tolstoy happened to be alive. The Swedish Academy was so unnerved by the public criticism it received that its members made a point of passing over Tolstoy for the rest of his life—just to show, apparently, that they knew what they were doing the first time around—honoring instead such immortals as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, and Selma Lagerlöf. When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition. English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. “This threat of scandal,” as he puts it, “is constitutive of the cultural prize.” His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.”

--Louis Menand, “All that Glitters: Literature’s Global Economy,” The New Yorker, issue of 12/26/05 and 1/2/06, posted 12/19/05.