An Eight-Year-Old at Sea

The representation of art is much more powerful when it speaks of a verism that language cannot adequately capture. Catching a fish on the Mediterranean. It was a good day. The fish was big. The painter recreated the event months after.

A much loved piece.

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Marriage Makes One Fat? Study Says: 'Yes, It Does.'

Uri Gneezy and Jason Shafrin's study is entitled: "Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat? Incentives and Appearance Maintenance."

The abstract says:

"Married individuals weight more on average than non-married individuals. We suggest that exiting the dating market decreases one’s incentive to maintain their appearance and thus leads to an increase in body weight. The paper uses a 13 year panel data set and exploits variation in the type of domestic relationship in order to pinpoint how exiting the dating market affects body weight. We find a positive correlation between the strength of the domestic relationships in terms of probability of termination and weight gain."

A couple of paragraphs from the study say:

"In this paper we test the appearance maintenance hypothesis empirically using a 13 year panel data set from the Netherlands. We exploit variation in the type of domestic relationships to see whether individuals in domestic relationships with a higher
probability of termination will gain less weight than those who enter into domestic relationships where the probability the relationship will terminate is lower. We find that individuals who enter into cohabitation relationships gain less weight than those who enter into traditional marriage relationships.

Further, we observe that having a child reduces the probability that a relationship terminates. The marginal impact of having a child decreases the probability a couple separates more for cohabitators and marriages with a prenuptial agreement than for couples in traditional marriages; traditional marriages already had a lower separation probability so the marginal effect of having a child is less than is the case for cohabitators or marriages with prenuptial agreements. As our theory predicts, married individuals with a prenuptial agreement gain more weight after having a child than would be the case when an individual in a traditional marriage has a child. For cohabitators the results are imprecise because fewer cohabitators have children than married couples. Overall, our results show a correlation between the probability a domestic relationship will terminate and subsequent weight gain.:

Read it all via Tyler Cowen blog, MR.

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New Podcast: A Gendering of Big Love

In this podcast I am doing a review of the HBO show Big Love.
To listen to the podcast, click here.
The music featured on this podcast comes from Camille Nelson's new album First Words.

This podcast is also featured on iTunes under Gendering the Media with Brikena Ribaj.

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Taylor Swift?! Uh-huh!

Today I rocked to country.
Yes. I did.

I rocked to country music.

The reason I say this twice is because, well, for lack of a better phrase, I don't do country. I don't know why. I just can't. I am not attracted to it. I never was. While I'm sure that country music feeds many people, it doesn't manage to feed me in any way. Not even with carbs. It's a preference issue, you see. For example, I love Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven, and Mozart but I don't care for Schumann. I love Indie rock but basically everything about Grunge bothers me. And, yes, Nirvana is an exception. Kurt Cobain is bigger than any genre. And I loved him. Very much. I still do. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" continues to be a high-frequency track. It's not grunge, it's classic. So there are exceptions within certain genres, of course.

Now back to my country encounter today. I rocked out to Taylor Swift's "Love Story."
At the end of the tenth lap at the pool, I thought I would take a 60-second break and change up the routine. I remove the items that guarantee my isolation from the surroundings and I suddenly hear this uber-loud song blasting from the loudspeakers.
I gave out a 'huh?' Hmm. The pool is sounding like a Bavarian disco? How about that!

After my 60-second break at the pool, I found myself rocking to the song the loudspeakers were feeding my already-filled-with-water ears. At the end of the mini-break, I found myself singing along with Taylor: "Romeo, save me... My daddy said "stay away from Juliet" Marry me, Juliet... Baby just say 'yes.''

I remember letting out a 'HA!' and then put my cap and goggles back on and got to the second half of the work-out. I couldn't get Swift's words out of my head. I then tried to switch to Verdi. Verdi always bails me out. I tried Nabucco but words like 'Romeo take me somewhere we can be alone, you can be the prince, I can be the princess' kept creeping in. I had another 20 minutes left in my routine, so I was stuck. My iPod and Keane were calling me but I resisted. Instead, I gave in and sang in my head, ''And I said, Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone."

At the end of the workout, I get to my iPod and listen to Keane's Perfect Symmetry. Keane, de-Swift me swiftly, please. It didn't work.
I turn to Verdi. Nichts!

Now, I support the arts. And I most actively support music. For without music I wouldn't be who I am. But I am very, very specific about what I like. And country is not it. We're all entitled to having our favorites and Indie is what I choose. Indie is what I have chosen for years now. And this week has been a very good week for me. I got Franz Ferdinand's new album, Lily Allen's new stuff, and The Annie Lennox Collection. And it's not even Friday yet. So, what's this country business about?

And I know exactly what my annoyance consists of. Taylor Swift's little, puerile track is a distraction. Much like Lifehouse was a few years ago when their music kept me from more relevant artists like the Magnetic Fields or Morrissey. And this is supposed to be Verdi's time. This is Verdi's month. So, Taylor, I'm sure you have plenty of other fans out there. I am not hiring. I never was. My love is already spoken for. And it's good. It's very, very good.

Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman

Economy of speech, peut-être?

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Uta Dirks: German Businesswoman Par Excellence

This is Uta Dirks




She is the owner and operator of this:












Here is Uta's podcast.


Her official Germany-based site is here.

Uta Dirks is a linguist par excellence.
She writes brilliantly.
She takes beautiful photographs.
She gives the words reason and balance a new, graspable meaning.
She is one of the sharpest individuals I know whose professional and personal opinion I trust completely.
She is the best travel buddy anyone could ever have especially if one is a picky, boundary-conscious individual who also likes to experience it all at the same time.
She understands the culture of language better than anyone I know and, as a result, perfectly gets what human civility and boundaries entail.
Uta can do any culture because she can decode with ease the precepts of Culture. She gets the deep structure of Language, ergo the surface structure is a given. Some people manage to do that naturally and no amount of education and/or artificially acquired linguistic experience can quite procure that for one. Uta happens to have both: great linguistic instinct and first-rate training.

The reason why I’m blogging about Uta is not to share my bragging rights for a friend I love dearly who makes me proud on a quotidian basis. The reason I do so is to proudly make you all aware of what she has accomplished in Kiel, Germany and how much she will now be accomplishing world-wide thanks to a cyber expansion of her language business.

And, folks, nobody gets the language business the way she does. Language is her business.

So, if you have any German-related questions at all, might I strongly recommend that you reach Uta Dirks first. You will not only get quality and speed, you will get a kind of linguistic experience the German romantics of the likes of Schlegel wrote about: a conglomeration of language, the arts, elegance of presentation, precision of expression, and culture.

The motto of Uta’s business is: LIV: Language, Interaction, Vision.
That is the motto of Uta’s life, too.
And what a brilliant life LIV-er she is!

Proudly and happily I sign off.

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Darwin's Relevance

Good bit on the Times.

Another example of the researcher's need to have and and keep an open mind. Few great things were accomplished without the latter, after all.


"How did Darwin come to be so in advance of his time? Why were biologists so slow to understand that Darwin had provided the correct answer on so many central issues? Historians of science have noted several distinctive features of Darwin’s approach to science that, besides genius, help account for his insights. They also point to several nonscientific criteria that stood as mental blocks in the way of biologists’ accepting Darwin’s ideas."

Read it here.

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Robert Christgau's "Grown Up All Wrong"

I have always maintained that people's dislike of Yoko Ono was a sexism-informed type of injustice. As if Yoko Ono would have been able to break the Beatles up when they were making great music and, most importantly, when they were putting up with one another! Not a chance. This is simply a matter of opinion.

I happen to think that the creative impulse is much greater and more powerful than any human input we get externally.

'Familiarity breeds contempt' says the old a-la-Freud phrase. At times it might not but very often it does.
Maybe John had enough of Paul, George, and the other guy.
I have always thought the latter to be a much more plausible and human nature-informed reaction than the ludicrous blaming of Yoko.
Oh, Yoko, how they hate.

Now, whether you think rock 'n roll is relevant or not, you will find Robert Christgau's book Grown Up All Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno informative, gripping, and oozing a true love for music.

One's love for music cannot be artificially acquired. Music lives in one. Like the day you decide to skip a meal and listen to a record because it feeds you more. Or the other time you drop all things of significance to hear Matt Bellame of Muse because, for some reason, his music makes more sense to you than all the things of importance you do during the day, or the time you say no to a game of Ping-Pong because you'd rather 'rock' to Verdi.

Christgau, a rock journalist par excellence broods over the socio-historical/political aspect of the genius of rock 'n roll.
Instead of pontificating over the for-lack-of-a-better-word significance of rock 'n roll, consider Christgau's explanation as to why the Beatles broke up:

"The Beatles broke up because they were idealistic enough to be convinced of their historical mission and realistic enough to know they were no longer capable of carrying it forward. The Beatles broke up because they didn't see or care that the corporate life of a rock group could endure long after its collective life was kaputt. The Beatles broke up because the couple is a more stable structure than the four-way. The Beatles broke up because three of them believed they were geniuses and only one one of them was. The Beatles broke up because they thought they were immortal. The Beatles broke up because they couldn't stand each other anymore" (125).

Do read Christgau's book. If nothing else, it will inform. Most adequately.

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Best Sentence of the Day

The tip of the hat goes to William James for 'best sentence I read today.' Via Gretchen Rubin:

"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it."

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New Podcast: Flight of the Conchords

I pick a lot of good things in California. And, the HBO show Flight of the Conchords is no exception.

In this nine-minute podcast I provide a short gendered analysis of the show. Something very interesting is captured in this show with regards to gender performativity as the two main characters, Bret and Jemaine, represent a naturally comfortable homosociality. Bret and Jemaine represent a homosocial setting that manages to come across as natural, even conventional, because it oozes elements of genuine human intimacy. In this piece I postulate that it is precisely because of this genuine human intimacy that gender boundaries and stereotypes are shattered and the heteronormative framework is shaken. The music featured in this podcast comes from Camille Nelson's new album First Word. The review of my wonderfully talented friend is here.

Listen to the podcast here.

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