Big Budget Bland

by Conroy

The epitome of the mega-budget movie

We live in the era of the mega-budget movie. Those films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and tens of millions more to market. By my count, in the last seven years there have been eighteen movies with a production budget of at least $200 million (see table below). These movies share one characteristic – they’re dominated by digital effects.

Back in 1998 David Foster Wallace skewered Hollywood for enthusiastically embracing what he termed the “F/X Porn” genre: Mega-budget movies that feature massive doses of highly effective, sensuous special effects, but very little character or plot. Prominent examples from the 1990s include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park [1], and Twister. He likened these movies to pornography – instead of porn’s prurient carnality, there are a few elaborate, terrifically convincing effects sequences separated by long segments of vapid, formulaic storytelling.

Wallace cited the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, which may sound like a concept plucked from a microeconomics textbook, but was actually his invention. Stated simply, the “ICQL” says, “the larger a movie’s budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be.” For a movie snob like me, this idea seems so obvious that I’m embarrassed I didn’t articulate something similar. When Wallace developed the ICQL, it hadn’t been that long since “T2” and Jurassic Park revolutionized the scope and role of special effects. They were no longer a feature of many big budget movies; effects became their very reason for being. The ICQL posits that mega-budget effects movies need a bankable star, a simple plot relying on proven formulas and easy sentiment, and lots of distracting digital effects. In addition, corollaries to the ICQL state that (a) the more lavish the effects the worse the non-effects parts of the movie will be, and (b) the necessities of a mega-budget-effects movie will subsume the creativity and originality in even the most talented director [2].

Maybe the first "F/X Porn" movie

The upshot of the ICQL is that mega-budget movies are stripped of what attracts people to storytelling in the first place, namely characters and plot. These elements have been the foundation of storytelling since the oral tradition of our distant ancestors. I love movies because, to paraphrase Martin Scorsese, they are our dreams brought to life. Movies offer a different experience (and better in many ways) than novels or plays or poems, or any of the other media we have to express our innate drive to tell stories – to communicate our human experience. Movies bring together sight and sound and humanity in ways unmatchable by other forms. That's what's so disappointing about mega-budget-effects movies, as the ICQL says, these movies abandon the core tenets of good storytelling and focus on distracting our minds by overwhelming our senses.

Two rhetorical questions: How many lines of dialogue can you remember from your favorite movie? What do those words, coming from those characters, mean to you? Two follow-up rhetorical questions: How many of the dazzling special effects sequences can you describe, in detail, from one of the recent mega-budget-effects movies? What do those effects sequence mean to you?

Ghost Stories

by Conroy

A ghost on the stairs?

This past Sunday, in anticipation of Halloween, CBS’ Sunday Morning featured a segment on ghosts and haunted places. I, incredulous as always, was stunned to hear the following statistic: 40% of Americans believe in ghosts and fully half of them (20% of Americans) believe they have actually seen or experienced a ghost (!). Needless to say, I’m unsettled (if not entirely stupefied) by the fact that 60 million of my compatriots seem to, well, either have suffered some sort of delusion or actually believe in the ridiculous. Still, ghosts, or the idea of ghosts, has too long a history and is too engrained in human culture not to intrigue.

Let me write upfront (if it isn’t already clear) that “ghosts” don’t exist, at least in the appear-as-a-phantasmal-presence-in-a-dark-corridor-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye type of way. Believers would label me a skeptic, but my disbelieving position is the majority view (thankfully), so let’s set that as the perspective of the rest of this post. “Ghosts” is an interesting and enduring cultural-religious conceit not an actual phenomenon.

Ghost Stories
Currently, the most popular movie in American theaters is Paranormal Activity 3, a prequel to the very effective original, a word-of-mouth hit from a couple of years ago. This movie is just the latest in what is a never ending procession of ghost stories. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s a hit: ghosts sell. Paranormal Activity (the original) cost almost nothing to make yet grossed almost $200 million in theaters worldwide. The same feat had previously been pulled off by The Blair Witch Project, a ghost-horror movie from 1999 that cost well under one million dollars (maybe a lot less) and grossed $250 million worldwide. And ghost stories are the subject of big-budget blockbusters as well (some serious, some not): the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, The Sixth Sense, Ghost, and Ghostbusters, for example. The lasting popularity of ghost movies means something.

Perhaps the most famous ghost in literature

Ghosts have appeared in our folktales and myths and finest literature, from the Bible and the Egyptian Book of the Dead to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By Dante in the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare in Hamlet and Macbeth, Dickens in A Christmas Carol, Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, and Oscar Wilde in The Canterville Ghost. Modern examples include Joyce’s Ulysses, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (even if the ghosts in Ulysses are just, to paraphrase Hamlet, in the mind’s eye).

I think you can also see how elemental the idea of ghosts is by the many terms we have for them. In addition to ghost there is: spirit, phantom, spook, specter, banshee, demon, soul, shade, wraith, haunt, apparition, haint, poltergeist, and revenant. And that’s probably an incomplete list.

Every Halloween images of ghosts are used as decorations (or lame costumes). Everyone knows of ghosts, whether that be Casper the Friendly Ghost, the surprisingly effective Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World, the over-sweet Boo Berry cereal, the sometimes heroic and sometimes funny (sometimes neither) Space Ghost, popular (sadly) television shows following “ghost hunters,” and advertised lists of what must be hundreds if not thousands of reputedly “haunted” places in the U.S. alone. The bottom line is that for most Americans the idea and symbology of ghosts is familiar, in a casual almost unmindful way.

So why the ubiquity of ghosts in our culture, especially since most people don’t believe they exist? I’ll attempt a few explanations:

Visiting History: The Battleship North Carolina

by Conroy

USS North Carolina

My dad and I, ever the enthusiasts of the historically interesting, were driving from Baltimore to Wilmington, North Carolina, on a quick sojourn to see the USS North Carolina [1], a World War II era battleship. It was early March, and our destination was more than a little motivated by my desire to take a short trip somewhere south (we were only just emerging from an unusually cold Maryland winter). Visiting the ship would allow us to interact with an actual historical artifact, not a battlefield or a monument, but a real object, something that had been "there," something we could see, and touch, and walk through.

In late afternoon, and after nine hours on the road, we arrived in Wilmington, which is located in the far southeast [2] of the state, along the Cape Fear River and just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The city's population has nearly doubled in the last two decades, but even by a generous assessment it remains mid-size. On first view it makes little impression, there's no distinctive skyline -- in fact no skyline -- on the approach to town. There's little sense that you've actually arrived anywhere, just the flat coastal greenery broken up by the standard low-rise, low-density development characteristic of American suburbia. However, we found our way by twists and turns to the center of the city, which included a quaint downtown with an abundance of antebellum architecture situated on the east bank of the river. And from that vantage point we spied the impressive silhouette of the North Carolina, cozily berthed in a narrow cove on the river's west bank. It was getting late, the ship was dark against the fading sun, but at least we knew where we were going the next day.

Central Wilmington

Wilmington is an interesting location for the ship, now a National Historic Landmark. As North Carolina's only real seaport, it makes sense for the ship to be docked there, but Wilmington is a provincial city, out of the way -- you have to want to go to Wilmington to end up there. In a way that's a fitting place for the North Carolina, a fair analogue to the role it played in history.



 ---

USS North Carolina
The next day, Saturday, was exquisite. The sun was what meteorologists like to term, brilliant; the sky a clear cerulean. The air held the first hints of vernal warmth. In late morning, we crossed the river just downstream of the ship, but we didn't get a good view until we pulled into the parking lot. We were among the first there. Looking from up close, it's hard not to be impressed with the North Carolina. Our first perspective was of the ship's profile. The hull sweeps in a majestic arc, parallel to the water at the stern and rising to its exaggerated wave-splitting bow. The busy but balanced superstructure rises from the center of the hull and is guarded closely by three massive gun turrets, two fore and one aft of the superstructure. The ship is painted with a fresh dazzle scheme of alternating gunmetal gray and bluish white, which was meant as a form of camouflage...though I doubt the North Carolina could be missed. The ship is more than two football fields long and its radar tower rises to 200 feet above the waterline. Large enough that you have to turn your head to see it all even from a hundred paces away.

One must pass through a visitor's center [3] (and gift shop) to board the ship. There's a gangway from the visitor's center to the stern-half port-side deck (the ship faces west). The cove where the North Carolina is moored looks like it was made to fit the ship (and it probably was dredged for this purpose). Indeed, the water is so still and likely has received so much sedimentation since the North Carolina was towed into position fifty years ago, that the massive hull probably rests on the bottom. My dad labeled it, "a mud hole," [4] and it does seem incongruously narrow and shallow and confining for the mass of the ship. The deck surface isn't steel, but teak [5], a wood durable enough to stand up to the corrosive effects of seawater and that doesn't get slippery when wet. It's a pleasant sandy brown color, which complements the gray and white of the rest of the ship. Once on board, everything looks even bigger than from the shore. It looks like what it was designed to be, an engine of war.

A Unilingual World - A Counterpoint

I have personally struggled with the issue that Conroy discusses in his most recent post, trying to decide whether to make the tremendous (for me) effort to learn Spanish as a second language. Most of the people in my office speak Spanish (I work in South Florida); for some of them, it is their first language. We have had clients who speak only Spanish, and I've had to have a translator help me communicate with them. Clearly, I would be better off bilingual. But I'm not bilingual, and learning a second language at my age (I'm in my 30s) is no easy task. Plus, the time I spend learning basic Spanish skills is time I could spend learning more about the law, which includes a rich specialized vocabulary all of its own. I have also found that most of my bilingual colleagues come to me for advice about the English language, and they don't care that I don't speak Spanish (or even attempt to). They are much more eager to learn my language rather than teach me theirs.

So even though I agree with Conroy that it would be great to know a second a language (or a third, or fourth), I've decided to maintain focus on my primary occupation for now. Of course, things might change. My wife speaks some Spanish and is thinking about learning more after she finishes her MBA. If she decides to study Spanish, that may tip the scale for me. It would be considerably more fun and less stressful to learn another language together with a partner. That's how I've addressed the question for myself. But I would also encourage others to focus on improving their English skills as opposed to studying a foreign language. For one thing, I believe we should strive for a universal language, and learning multiple languages does not promote that end. Don't get me wrong. I am in favor of diversity in language. But as we can see from English, or any other particular language examined closely, one language alone can be incredibly rich and diverse.

In fact, one of the main reasons English is so rich and diverse is that it has assimilated so many other languages. I'm strongly in favor of that. So spice up your writing with a foreign phrase now and then. Take what is best from other languages—the most vivid, the most useful words and expressions. There is plenty to learn. This past weekend, for instance, I learned that Kurt Gödel was known as Herr Warum ("Mr. Why") because of his unquenchable curiosity. Today, I learned that Justice Brandeis used to refer to FDR's policies as Kunststucke ("clever tricks"). I also learned that the term "shyster," often falsely attributed to the character Shylock from Shakespeare, actually has its origins in the German word scheisse (look it up), a word worth knowing. (Read Michael Lewis's recent article, "It’s the Economy, Dummkopf!" for a strange, scatological analysis of this and other German words.) 

These are all great foreign words, and I'm happy to have learned them. But learning individual words or phrases is far different from learning an entire language. It is much easier, and more fun, and, I would argue, more beneficial to the English language. And it gives you a broader sampling of all the interesting languages out there. So go out there and take the most interesting words from German, take them from Spanish, from French, and Yiddish, and Russian, and even Mandarin (if that's possible). Don't spend your time trying to gain fluency. Instead, mine these languages for their most vivid words and phrases—and steal them!—enrich the English language with them! Just as you, Conroy, have enriched this blog by teaching us the French phrase mot juste.

As for teaching children foreign languages, I think there's an argument for that. It's debatable, though. Being bilingual has certain advantages. But it may also have disadvantages; you can't be an expert in everything. This problem is even more pronounced with adults. Why spend precious time grappling with a foreign language, only to gain a halting grasp of it, when you could be using that time improving your English? The fact is most adults simply will not be able to gain fluency in a foreign language no matter how hard they try. However, they probably can make small but important improvements to their English, which will be more likely to help them with their careers—these days it pays to know English as well as you can know it—and in doing so they will help keep the English language strong.

That said, Conroy, if you still want to study a foreign language, I'm supportive of that. If anyone has the willpower to become a polyglot as an adult, it's you. An interesting and neglected book on the subject that you might find interesting is called "Language Made Plain" by Anthony Burgess. It's chock full of interesting ideas, including techniques on how to learn a foreign language. He also wrote a follow-up book called "A Mouthful of Air," which I haven't read and can't vouch for, but I'm sure it's worth looking into. And if any of our readers have other suggestions for learning a language, particularly books on the subject, please let us know.

A Multilingual World

by Conroy

Language map of the world

There are nearly 7,000 languages spoken in our world. Eighty-five languages have more than 10 million native speakers. At least ten, but probably twelve languages are spoken as a first language by more than 100 million people (see list below). What remarkable linguistic diversity. What a shame that I can communicate in only one.

English as a Global Language
Of course if I'm limited to one language, I guess it's good that it's English. Over the last few hundred years English has grown from a provincial language spoken by a few million people in England, Wales, and lowland Scotland to a de facto global tongue. Today English is the most widely spoken language in the world; it is estimated that over one-quarter of the world's population can communicate in the language to at least a rudimentary level (>1.5 billion people).

English is the official language for aviation and seafaring, an official language of the United Nations, European Union, and the International Olympic Committee, and predominant in diplomacy and international communications, science, computing and the internet, business, and entertainment. The rise of English can be traced to the preeminent international role in economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military affairs played by English speaking nations--Great Britain from the late eighteenth century and the United States since World War II. Review a list of the most popular movies of all time, or the most popular musicians, all are were produced or performed in English. How many of The 2011 Time 100, Time Magazine's list of most influential people in the world (an imperfect measure for sure), are native English speakers or fluent in the language? All but a handful.

The most popular band of all time wrote (almost) entirely in English

In fact, English has been adopted in so many parts of the world for so many purposes that the nature of the language might be changing. There are arguments that English could be in the process of being co-opted from the anglophone world, and is morphing into something considerably different, World English. The end result of this process would leave Modern English as nothing more than a dialect of a larger global language. We'll see, Latin was once thought to be a global language and now it's all but dead. And in an increasingly connected world will English really bifurcate and evolve as substantially as theorized?

Today, the language is the Mother Tongue of a rather short list of nations: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Belize, Guyana, and several Caribbean countries. However, it's an official language spoken widely in many nations that used to be part of the British Empire (or former  American colonies), e.g., South Africa, Nigeria, and India. An English speaker could travel to most places in the world confident of finding locals with a passable understanding of his or her language. Many English speakers may be tempted to think all other languages secondary, and a working fluency in other languages unnecessary. Perhaps Americans, like the present writer, are most guilty of this linguistic chauvinism.

Poor English

by Conroy

I was just reading an old essay from the late David Foster Wallace about tennis and Roger Federer (what else). In part of the essay he was recounting some commentary regarding racket technology and its affect on the modern game, which was written on plaques hung on the hallowed halls of Wimbledon's Millennium Building. There was one sentence in particular that drew his attention:

"Nowadays it is the powerful hitters who dominate with heavy topspin."

He goes on to masterfully analyze and correct the underlying premise, but what made me laugh was this footnote:

"(...assuming, that is, that the sign's 'with heavy topspin' is modifying 'dominate' rather than 'powerful hitters,' which actually it might or might not--British grammar is a bit dodgy.)

Wallace was an acclaimed novelist, critic, essayist, and expert grammarian (not to mention a tennis fan). I like his cheekiness to challenge "British" grammar, sure to rankle our cousins across the pond. Of course my smile was quickly tempered when I thought about what Foster's critical eye would have made of this blog, and my myriad grammatical errors, word missteps, and sometimes careless proofreading.

The truth is that writing is hard. I think I write alright, but English (American or British or any other variation) is so complex, with so many grammar rules -- many of them debated -- and so many words that it can be hard, and might be impossible, to write without mistakes. Consider a few of these challenges:

Writing the Right Word

The Man and I have both written about using the exact right word, the mot juste, to convey the meaning and context of a subject (see here and here). Well our language's seemingly endless vocabulary makes that both possible and daunting, but there is another challenge, more mundane and maybe more important. That's avoiding (accidentally) using the wrong word, a pitfall that even good writers can stumble over. English is full of homonyms and words with similar structures and related, but not synonymous, meanings. This can lead to trouble. A (very) small sampling:

[and I'm sure a close reading of this blog will reveal the occasional incorrect usage (hopefully just occasional) along these lines]

• accept versus except - I'll gladly accept any explanation you offer, except those that are obvious lies.
• accurate versus precise - It's accurate to write that Pi is about 3.14, but listing just two decimals isn't very precise.
• affect versus effect - The extreme cold weather had affected the crops , the net effect was a shortage of grain.
• alternately versus alternatively - Day alternates with night. I had many transportation alternatives when I was in new York.
  
• altogether versus all together - Altogether, I'm glad the riot is over. The crowd was all together when things turned violent.

The Music of 1991

by Conroy

Loveless - among the great albums of 1991

There's a new documentary out, Pearl Jam Twenty, that chronicles the eponymous band's two decade history. A history that started with a bang with the release of the hugely acclaimed, popular, and influential album, Ten in late 1991. Ten became a central document of the Seattle music scene, on the leading edge of the wave of grunge, a genre that seemed to change the course of rock music. The legacy of Ten is secure, but what is remarkable is that when taking a broader look back at the music of 1991, Ten appears to be just one - and not the best one - of many landmark albums from what must certainly be one of the great years in music history.

The Music of 1991
Readers of this blog know of my strong feelings about judging art. Only with time can we come to value all art, including music. Well, the passage of twenty years is surely time enough (I would think) to put the music of 1991 in proper perspective. The familiar narrative of that time holds that a band from Seattle changed the course of music history with the release of a monumental, epoch-defining album. This band wasn't Pearl Jam, but Nirvana, and the album the amazing Nevermind, which was spearheaded by the exceptional single "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It's been frequently noted that Nevermind became so popular that it knocked Michael Jackson's album Dangerous from the top of the album charts. A symbolic change that seemed to close out the music of the 1980s, including hair metal of bands like Warrant, Motley Crue, Cinderella and others. Nirvana was joined by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and other grunge bands to remake rock, under the greater label of "alternative rock", having an indelible influence on music for the rest of the decade.

That's the traditional story anyway, but like all history, it's a simplification that ignores what actually happened in 1991. It was a great year in music, but there was a lot more to it than the grunge scene of the Pacific Northwest.

Why We're Fans

by Conroy

Rays celebrate their playoff-clinching win

This isn't a sports blog. But this blogger is a sports fan, and I occasionally write sports-centered and sports-related posts. Whether as a witness to tennis excellence, as a critique of college sporting bureaucracy, or as in the case of this post, reflecting on a sequence of events from last night's Major League Baseball games that encapsulates why we fans spend our time and energy following the sports we love. Why we're fans in the first place.

A very short synopsis: last night, on the final day of the regular season, the Tampa Bay Rays and the St. Louis Cardinals clinched the American and National League Wild Card playoff slots, edging out respectively, the Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves. But how it happened is genuinely remarkable.

Major League Baseball has existed as an organization since 1876, just this past weekend the league's 200,000 game was played. That's vastly more than any other profession league in any other sport can boast. Yet journalists and broadcasters that follow the game, and long-term interested fans like this writer, have never witnessed a night like last night. A night eagerly anticipated, and then fulfilled by games loaded with tension and drama, improbable and sudden twists, and a timing of outcomes that's hard to believe. A baseball fan, a sports fan, could ask for nothing more.

Two Historic September Collapses
Coming into last night's games, the Rays and Red Sox were tied for the American League Wild Card. Ditto the Cardinals and Braves in the National League. The standings were surprising because the Red Sox and Braves had led the Wild Card races by 9 and 8.5 games at the beginning of the month. No team in baseball history had ever failed to make the playoffs with September leads that large. But awful months by both teams (7 wins and 20 losses for the Red Sox; 9 and 18 for the Braves) and strong finishes by the Rays and Cardinals made races out of what should have been early playoff berths. When I write awful, I mean not only were these teams losing, but in many ways their play - so solid all year - almost seemed self-destructive. Both teams were imploding and had one last night to try and salvage the season.

A Phenomenal September 28
All 30 teams played last night, but the baseball world's attention was focused on just four; the Red Sox and last-place Orioles in Baltimore, the playoff-bound Yankees and Rays in St. Petersburg, the Cardinals and woeful Astros in Houston, and the (MLB best) Phillies and Braves in Atlanta.

Cardinal win easy

The Cardinals clobbered the hapless Astros, jumping out to a 5-0 first inning lead on route to an easy 8-0 win that was over before 10:30 PM. They had clinched at least a one game playoff with the Braves.

The Braves jumped out to a 3-1 lead over Philadelphia. The Red Sox jumped to a 1-0 lead over Baltimore, fell behind 2-1, tied the game, and then took a 3-2 lead in the fifth inning. The Yankees jumped all over the Rays and starter David Price, taking a 5-0 second inning lead thanks to Mark Teixeira's grand slam, and stretching the lead to 7-0 by the fifth inning.

So far, nothing remarkable. In fact the Rays-Yankees game was turning out to be anti-climactic. Around 9:30 PM it started raining in Baltimore, leading to a rain delay with the Red Sox still leading 3-2 in the middle of the seventh inning. The Braves were leading by the same score. The Rays had managed just two hits. The Cardinals were rolling to victory. Anyone who turned away at this point could have never anticipated what was about to happen. Allow me to summarize in bullet form:

Day and Night

by Conroy

A day/night map of the world

Just a few days ago, September 23rd to be precise, was the September equinox. The date when the sun passes the Equator on its southward journey to the Tropic of Capricorn. Or to put it in a more accurate way, the date (and time) during our planet's revolution of the sun when the Earth's axis of rotation is directly perpendicular to the imaginary line connecting the centers of the Earth and sun. After this date the southern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun (and the northern hemisphere tilted away). From our terrestrial perspective, for the next few months the sun will head ever more southward until the December solstice (December 22 in 2011), when it will reach its southern limit and begin its journey back north, passing the equator for the March equinox (March 20, 2012), and reaching its northern limit at the June solstice (June 22, 2012). Only to head back south again, repeating the cycle, forever.

This familiar cycle, corresponding to the seasonal variation that is such a distinctive feature of life, especially in temperate climates, has always fascinated me. The alternation between summer and winter, light and dark, has directly affected where and how humans live.

The Abuse of the NCAA - A Counter Point

Conroy's post about the NCAA is interesting for the legal and economic issues it raises, in particular the antitrust problem that the NCAA faces. The fact that the NCAA is a cartel—a coalition of colleges agreeing with each other to restrain trade—organized as a monopsony helps explain its egregious behavior. Cartels are generally unstable, so enforcement and credibility are key. If anyone steps out of line, the hammer must fall. That's why the NCAA is so strict in enforcing its rules. And the NCAA is a best described as a monopsony—a single buyer—rather than a "monopoly"—a single seller. Its member colleges "buy" the labor of college athletes with scholarships, etc., but they have agreed not to compete with each other over the terms of the sale. A monopsony will drive prices down, which is what the NCAA has done.

So college players are exploited in the sense that they are paid less than what they would be paid in a competitive market, in which colleges would bid against each other for the athletes, driving the price up; and they also have less control over their own labor than they would if they had more bargaining power. And the NCAA is apparently able to get them to sign over their publicity rights, permanently. Contrast that with a typical non-compete agreement, wherein generally the restraint  has to be reasonable in time and location. Finally, bear in mind that the money these athletes could have earned, by for example selling their autographs, is transferred to other students, in the form of scholarships and cheaper ticket prices. This means that the NCAA effectively transfers money from athletes, who are often from underprivileged backgrounds, to students who are on average wealthier. It's not only inefficient but inequitable.

But often, when firms cannot compete by lowering (or, in a monopsony, raising) prices, they compete in some other dimension. So athletes reap other kinds of benefits. In fact, college athletes derive significant non-pecuniary benefits from being college athletes. They are revered, for one thing, even if not forever. It reminds me of the exchange in the movie Eight Men Out between Rothschild and Atell (the ex-boxer):

Arnold Rothstein: Altogether, I must've made ten times that amount betting on you and I never took a punch.
Abe Atell: Yeah, but I was champ. Featherweight champion of the world!
Arnold Rothstein: Yesterday. That was yesterday.
Abe Atell: No A.R. you're wrong. I was champ, and can't nothin take that away.

Of course, the NCAA creates more rules to limit competition in these dimensions, and generally it is more efficient to compete over prices, so these facts are not relevant to an antitrust analysis. Such an analysis would begin by noting that they NCAA is a cartel in which members are restrained in their ability to freely negotiate contracts—it's a horizontal price fixing arrangement. This makes it a "per se" violation of the Sherman Act. But when the Supreme Court examined the NCAA, it chose not to invalidate the arrangement as a per se violation. Instead, it applied the "rule of reason" and considered pro-competitive benefits that might justify the restraint of trade. The Court did so, because it believed that the "product," the college athlete—unpaid (i.e., amateur), attending classes, etc.—simply would not exist without the cartel:

This decision is not based on a lack of judicial experience with this type of arrangement, on the fact that the NCAA is organized as a nonprofit entity, or on our respect for the NCAA's historic role in the preservation and encouragement of intercollegiate amateur athletics. Rather, what is critical is that this case involves an industry in which horizontal restraints on competition are essential if the product is to be available at all.

This argument is not meritless. There are reasons to believe that if the NCAA were eliminated, college sports would suffer. Colleges would face higher costs. Labor costs would obviously rise, but there would also be tax and legal costs. Colleges might have to pay taxes on the income they derive from their teams, since they would be operating a business remote from their educational mission. They would also open themselves up to lawsuits brought under Title IX for discrimination, since female players would be paid less than male players. And converting college teams into professional teams would reduce team loyalty—alma maters would feel less connection to the players (and therefore the teams), be discouraged by trades, and feel less inclined to donate; and players would feel more pressure to take alternate offers and less loyalty to their teams.

The quality of the players might increase, and more resources might be diverted into college sports. But perhaps our society already puts too much emphasis on, and invests too much in, competitive sports. After all, it's a market characterized by superstars and arms-races, and for that reason prone to inefficiency. Choosing to participate in college sports means spending less time in the classroom. Eliminating the NCAA would make that trade-off more dramatic. It's a competitive world on and off the field, and we would do better as a society by investing more heavily in education and less heavily in sports.

The Abuse of the College Athlete

by Conroy

September is always an exciting time in college life. The semester has just started, freshman are getting acclimated to campus life, students (most of them) are getting back into the grove of studying, homework, and testing after a long summer of doing other things. This time is also the start of football season, a highly anticipated event at many colleges, especially the largest state and private universities. In fact college football is such an ingrained part of college life and the greater American culture that autumn Saturdays are synonymous with the sport. Scenes from bucolic campuses, of raucous jam-packed stadiums, and intense on-field competition paint a picture of joyful, if fervent (and a bit over-serious), leisure. But college football, and major college sports in general, are built on some unsettling realities.

This past week there was an excellent article by Taylor Branch in The Atlantic (which features some of the best writing anywhere) about the inherent hypocrisy and corruption of the National Collegiate Athletic Association - better known by the acronym NCAA. Mr. Branch's lengthy article is worth the read and it explores and explains many of the troubles attached to major college sports in America.

The central concern, unsurprisingly, has to do with money; the fact that college athletics, and especially football and (men's) basketball, are big business, worth nearly $11 billion per year to the nation's colleges and universities. And yet the "student-athlete" sees not one cent of this revenue. There are deep implications to this fact, and it has given rise to a sharply divided debate.

From one perspective, college sports offer athletes a golden opportunity to earn a college degree, for many a free education including tuition, room and board, and books. At many schools this could be worth well over $100,000 over four years (the maximum eligibility period for college athletes). Players get the invaluable experience of working as a team, compete at a high level, travel, and meet people they never would have otherwise. They also get to be a part of an essential element of the college experience, perhaps the central aspect of college life that binds the student body, faculty, and alumni together on a regular basis.

The opposing view sees high-level college athletes as nothing more than unpaid exploited labor. Players are placed under high pressure to compete and win with sport as the primary goal and education as a decidedly secondary focus. Football and basketball players are used to earn their college and the NCAA huge sums of money. And if these players dare to try and profit in any way from their own talents, they risk their eligibility and scholarships.

I've seen the merits of college athletics first hand. I was a student at the University of Maryland when my beloved Terps won the 2002 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, and felt the way the team's, our team's, accomplishments energized the student body (and even the faculty). It was a great experience and still is a great memory. However, I share many of the concerns regarding the fairness and indeed the appropriateness of major college sports. I offer a few of my thoughts:

Time Travel Silliness

by Conroy

The latest time travel entertainment

In a couple of weeks Fox will air Terra Nova, the most expensive television program in history. The show's premise is that future civilization can only be saved by sending humans back 85 million years into the past. I have no idea what in this extinct period is going to save humanity (I'm assuming that will be the ultimate outcome of the show), but such a setting does allow for dinosaurs (plentiful in the trailer) and undoubtedly many other obstacles challenging to modern man. Whatever the details, the program is just the latest in an unbroken string of high profile television shows, movies, and literature based on time travel. Or what I like to call the tired time travel conceit. Tired and preposterous. (It's right up there for me with all those movies where one person's consciousness gets switched into another person's body, or the unending end of the world apocalypse stories.)

The idea of time travel has been around for centuries (if not longer) and its use in fiction became prevalent in the nineteenth century, when the genre was adumbrated by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, then explicitly used by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and perhaps most famously in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. And these are just the more noteworthy examples. In time, time travel has become even more popular, unfortunately.

Now don't get me wrong, I like science fiction. And I know the whole point of the genre is to take humans to places and times different from the here and now. After all, isn't the point to remove people from the familiar and surround characters with radically different conditions in order see with fresh eyes the realities of the human condition? Or at least pose the relevant questions in a different light? That's the core of science fiction and it makes for some great stories and ideas...but time travel? Really, come on.

Time Travel and Paradoxes

The Terminator sent from the future

One well known example of what drives me crazy about time travel stories is from the Terminator. In the story a war between humans and machines is being fought in the not-too-distant future. The machines utilize time travel to send back an android (excuse me, "cybernetic organism") "terminator" to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor the human leader, before he was conceived. If the android succeeds then Connor will never be born and the human rebels will be leaderless (I guess). To stop the Terminator, Connor sends back a human to protect his young mother. In the process of the movie, the human protector, Kyle Reese, impregnates Connor's mother -- with Connor. This is a classic example of what is known as a predestination paradox. Reese travels back in time on orders from John Connor, impregnates Connor's mother, who then gives birth to John Connor. If Reese is never sent back, Connor can never be born, and the adult Connor cannot order Reese to go back and protect his mother. There are other examples of this just from the Terminator and its sequels.

City of Bridges

by Conroy


New York, perhaps the world's greatest city, is renowned for many things. The largest city in the United States, and one of the largest in the world, it's a center of world culture, commerce, finance, education, entertainment, and international affairs. The city is densely sprawled over five boroughs situated on three islands - Manhattan, Long Island (Brooklyn and Queens), Staten Island, and the mainland (the Bronx). Probably the first image that comes to your mind when thinking of New York is its famous skyline. The city, and especially Manhattan, is synonymous with that great American invention, the skyscraper. However, if you let your thoughts fall from all those celebrated buildings, and think about how the city's islands are linked (to each other and the mainland), perhaps you'll recall some of New York's other great engineering monuments - its many outstanding bridges. Indeed, for someone captivated by large bridges, such as myself, there can be no better city in the world to visit than New York, the city of bridges.

Last weekend a couple of friends and I drove to New York to watch the U.S. Open. Leaving New Jersey we crossed the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island, went across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, and past the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge on the way to Queens. Each distinctive and impressive, but these exemplars are only a fraction of the total. All told there are 37 major road and rail (or combination) bridges in the city. They include all major forms:

• arch (Alexander Hamilton, High, Washington);
• bascule (Greenpoint Avenue, Pelham, Pulaski);
• beam (Rikers Island);
• cantilever (Goethals, Queensboro, Outerbridge);
• causeway (Cross Bay Veterans Memorial, Joseph P. Addabbo);
• steel arch (Bayonne, Hell Gate, Henry Hudson);
• suspension (Brooklyn, Bronx-Whitestone, George Washington, Manhattan, Robert F. Kennedy (formerly the Triborough), Throgs Neck, Verrazano-Narrows);
• swing (145th Street, City Island, Macombs Dam, Madison Avenue, Spuyten Duyvil, University Heights, Willis Avenue);
• truss (Kosciuszko, Third Avenue), and;
• vertical lift (Arthur Kill, Broadway, Marine Parkway, Park Avenue, Roosevelt Island).

The Historic
This long list includes the historic, the massive, and the beautiful. Let's start with the historic, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge spans the East River and connects lower Manhattan with northwest Brooklyn. It was designed by the famous bridge builder John Roebling and completed by his son Washington; construction spanned the years 1870 to 1883; it is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the country. At the time it was built it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It represented a leap in engineering and is a forerunner of the great suspension bridges built in the twentieth century. Its combination of engineering innovation, impressive size (especially for the time), and distinctive architecture have made it a New York icon and one of the most recognizable bridges in the world.

Games of Youth

by Conroy

"Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul."

Chess - one of the first "adult" games I learned to play

This quote is from Friedrich Frobel, one of the fathers of modern education and inventor of the concept of kindergarten. While the language is grandiloquent it must contain some truth. What I'm sure of is that the word play is synonymous with childhood as the word work is with adulthood. As a child I would play; as an adult I work. This is a reality so firmly ingrained that until just recently I had given little thought to the matter.

The truth is I'm not prone to sentimentalism of nostalgia, no more than the next man anyway, but I do have a sharp memory. That memory was jolted the other day as I was searching through some storage bins in my basement - the common repository for forgotten possessions - and came across my classic board game Axis & Allies. Like Proust's response to the madeleine, my mind whirled over all those games I played in my youth. As I thought further I realized that play, that games, must be one of the defining features of my younger years. Games of all forms and varieties. Games of skill, of intellect, of speed and strength.

Today, my adult years, I rarely play games, and I thought of why that might be. I had to go back to the games I played as a child to understand.

World Domination

"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent actions called games." - W.H. Auden

I thought of my dad teaching me chess as a young boy. I wasn't the next Bobby Fisher, but I had a knack for strategy and other games beckoned. I thought of playing Stratego and Risk, imagining myself as the youthful Napoleon as I led my triumphant armies to glorious victories. I thought of Axis & Allies and how even as a young teenager I was aware that the game makers made it palatable to play as the Germans by showing the Iron Cross on the game pieces instead of the Nazi swastika. But I thought most about Empire Deluxe.

Better Cars and Worse Roads

by Conroy

The future belongs to fuel efficient cars

In June, the Obama Administration proposed substantial changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (known by the acronym CAFE). The changes would require a near doubling in the fuel efficiency, measured in miles per gallon (mpg), for passenger cars and light trucks. The automobile industry, represented by most of the major auto manufacturers (Volkswagen being the major exception), is supporting the new CAFE standards (with a few modest adjustments). As announced in late July, the fleet average fuel efficiency for new passenger cars and light trucks by 2025 will have to be 54.5 mpg. This follows on the heels of earlier regulations that will require new cars and trucks to have a fleet average fuel efficiency of 35.5 mpg by 2016.

Earlier this month the president announced the first ever fuel efficiency standards for heavy trucks (18-wheelers, tankers, etc.). These standards would require percentage improvements in fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions by 2018 based on the type of truck and how it will be used. The American Trucking Association (ATA), an industry advocacy group representing trucking companies and commercial truck owners, is supporting the new standards.

The immediate objective of these new rules is to reduce gasoline consumption and ghg emission, with the larger goal of increasing energy independence, spurring the development of clean car technology, and improving air quality. As with all federal rules, there will be numerous loopholes, exemptions, options to pay penalties in lieu of compliance, and complicated methods for actually measuring fuel efficiency and vehicle emissions. However, assuming these new rules are fully (or even largely) implemented, there will be major ramifications for the vehicles you and I buy and drive over the next fourteen years (and beyond). But perhaps an even bigger effect will be not to the vehicles we drive in, but to the roads we drive on.