Name them

It's interesting that the Times' Elaine Sciolino seems to think it's normal in her article about riots touched off by the deaths of two young French teens of African descent--As Violence Ebbs, Sarkozy Calls Riots Unacceptable--to not quote or even mention any French people of African descent.

She doesn't even give us the names of the boys who were killed, Moushin, 15, and Larami, 16.

We do get lots of quotes from, and mentions of, Sarkozy in his various guises (“Scum”, “Kärcher”, Boss, Sarko); lots of quotes from elderly non-African Frenchies who like him--but nothing from the population most affected by the deaths, and now the riots.

I think as long as French people of African and Arabic descent are literally unheard even when they take to the streets, they will keep taking to the streets.

And as long as reporters like Sciolino feel they can report a story like this without actually stepping foot in the non-white French world, Americans will have a hard time understanding anything beyond what Sarko thinks.

Love and travel

A couple of particularly interesting items from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for today, via the daily email newsletter.

-It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup, born in Jefferson, Iowa (1901). He was a student at the University of Iowa when he conducted his first poll for the Daily Iowan, to find the prettiest girl on campus. The winner was Ophelia Smith, whom Gallup later married.

-Ticket

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn't where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you've never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn't you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

Poem: "Ticket" by Charles O. Hartman, from Island. © Ahsahta Press, 2004.

Watercolor of Greek church by Rebecca McGoodwin after photo by Louise Robertson

Name game

There's a protypical well-done Times piece up by crack reporter Sam Roberts,
In Name Count, Garcias Are Catching Up With Joneses, that builds off some Census data.

I'm not sure why more newspapers haven't mastered this type of piece--just take new data, talk to some normal people and some experts, and produce a snapshot of a growing trend.

Some interesting excerpts from the piece:

Step aside Moore and Taylor. Welcome Garcia and Rodriguez.

Smith remains the most common surname in the United States, according to a new analysis released yesterday by the Census Bureau. But for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are among the top 10 most common in the nation, and Martinez nearly edged out Wilson for 10th place. ...

Garcia moved to No. 8 in 2000, up from No. 18, and Rodriguez jumped to No. 9 from 22nd place. The number of Hispanic surnames among the top 25 doubled, to 6. ...

Luis Padilla, 48, a banker who has lived in Miami since he arrived from Colombia 14 years ago, greeted the ascendance of Hispanic surnames enthusiastically.

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.” ...

The latest surname count also signaled the growing number of Asians in America. The surname Lee ranked No. 22, with the number of Lees about equally divided between whites and Asians. Lee is a familiar name in China and Korea and in all its variations is described as the most common surname in the world.

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person. ...

But the fact that about 1 in every 25 Americans is named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis “suggests that there’s a durability in the family of man,” Mr. Kaplan, the author, said. A million Americans share each of those seven names. An additional 268 last names are common to 10,000 or more people. Together, those 275 names account for one in four Americans.

I wonder how many Garcias and Rodriguezes it'll take to prevent the Times from calling stories like this a 'dilemma': Immigration Dilemma: A Mother Torn From a Baby:

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The decision to separate a mother from her breast-feeding child drew strong denunciations from Hispanic and women’s health groups. Last week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency rushed to issue new guidelines on the detention of nursing mothers, allowing them to be released unless they pose a national security risk.

Lost in non-translation

The Post has a slightly misleading piece up, Looking to Adopt A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Surging.

Told through the story of an interesting student at Maryland who literally stumbled into studying Persian, the numbers, Susan Kinzie reports, are:

Interest in non-European languages, traditionally less commonly taught in the United States, has been surging, according to survey results released yesterday by the Modern Language Association.

More college students across the country are enrolling in language classes, and that is particularly true for Middle Eastern and Asian languages. Chinese language classes jumped 51 percent from 2002 to 2006 to nearly 52,000, and Korean grew 37 percent to more than 7,000. Arabic classes increased more than 126 percent to nearly 24,000.

And enrollments in Persian language classes nearly doubled nationally, although the total numbers, around 2,300, are still tiny, especially compared to popular languages such as Spanish.

Oddly, the article doesn't list the comparable numbers. Off the MLA website, we find:

The study of the most popular languages--Spanish, French, and German--continues to grow and represents more than 70% of language enrollments.

Inside, in the press release, we find the full list, with numbers of students enrolled/% of all enrollments/increase since 2002:

1) Spanish 822,985 52.2% + 10.3%

2) French 206,426 13.1% + 2.2%

3) German 94,264 6.0% + 3.5%

4) American Sign Language 78,829 5.0% + 29.7%

5) Italian 78,368 5.0% + 22.6%

6) Japanese 66,605 4.2% + 27.5%

7) Chinese 51,582 3.3% + 51.0%

8) Latin 32,191 2.0% + 7.9%

9) Russian 24,845 1.6% + 3.9%

10) Arabic 23,974 1.5% +126.5%

11) Ancient Greek 22,849 1.4% + 12.1%

12) Biblical Hebrew 14,140 0.9% - 0.3%

13) Portuguese 10,267 0.7% + 22.4%

14) Modern Hebrew 9,612 0.6% + 11.5%

15) Korean 7,145 0.5% + 37.1%

Hmm, "surging?" Heck, you could just as easily have written a piece about ASL, Italian, and Portuguese....

The headline's particularly egregious, since it presumes the traditional European trio of Spanish/French/German aren't 'foreign' the way these Asian and Middle Eastern tongues are.

In addition--when you start with such a small base, you'd think it'd be pretty critical to show the other languages for comparison so readers can understand how underwhelming the numbers overall are. And to note similar spikes were seen in other languages that can't be explained by geopolitics.

Maybe all that happened is we're in the middle of a surge in college enrollment, so with more kids around, more of them are taking pretty much all languages.

Or, since we know smaller schools can experience a spike in applications through such random things as one of their sports teams doing particularly well in football/basketball, or through placement on a big TV show/movie, maybe kids walking past TVs are just hearing these countries more, making them seem more relateable.

Really, I think the article should've been: Tripping Over A Foreign Tongue: Student Interest in Asian, Mideast Languages Lags Far Behind Where Reason Would Place It, Experts Probe Impact of Media Portrayal of Non-European Countries As 'FOREIGN'

Ginormous

Every so often you read an article that makes you go 'wow!' Here's the Houston Chronicle's Jonathan Feigen, Yikes! Yao vs. Yi is huge:

Tonight will bring the first NBA meeting of Yao and the player expected to be the next Chinese NBA star, Yi Jianlian, an occasion that could draw the largest global audience to see an NBA game. ...

"Here we have two gentlemen, from different regions, Shanghai (Yao) and the Guandong Province (Yi), and who mean so much to this enormous country, with an enormous television market and enormous love for basketball," [NBA Commissioner David] Stern said. "Now we have the exclamation point."

The game will be on 19 networks in China, including CCTV-5, Guangdong TV, Guangzhou TV, and ESPN Star Sports in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It also will be available live through two Webcasters.

Though ratings estimates in China are difficult and vary widely, today's game is said to be certain to draw 150 million viewers and could reach 250 million. CCTV-5 alone is available in 210 million households.

Yao's first game against Shaquille O'Neal in 2002 drew an estimated audience of 220 million and the largest cable television ratings in the United States for a regular-season game since the 1995 comeback of Magic Johnson.

"I heard there were close to 200 million people that watched," Yao said. "But come on, in our country, we have (1.3) billion. That's still a small part of it." ...

When the Indianapolis Colts played the New England Patriots last Sunday, the average audience during the game was 33.8 million; 66.4 million saw at least a six-minute portion.

The average audience for Super Bowl XLI was 93 million, with 139.8 million seeing at least six minutes. There have been estimates Super Bowls draw a global audience of roughly 150 million.

The audience for tonight's Rockets game, starting on a Saturday morning in China, could exceed the Super Bowl, Colts-Patriots game and the Friday ESPN NBA games combined.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Michael Hunt weighs in as well, Young star puts Bucks on global market:

Almost as many people in a faraway land will watch an NBA game as the number of number of people who exist in the country that invented basketball. Such a staggering notion probably wasn't on Dr. Naismith's mind as he drove home that final nail in the peach basket.

Here's another thing to consider: It wasn't that long ago when the Bucks were happy to get a couple of people in outer Waukesha County to watch them play. To think that someone in Inner Mongolia is going to know that our little team even exists seems almost as implausible as Jake Voskuhl dunking on Yao.

That was one of the reasons the Bucks took Yi with the sixth pick in the draft. The most important reason, the one that is making the Bucks look smarter every day, is that Yi is going to be a tremendous player in this league. You can tell after four games, but more on that in a moment.

"I think there were 100 million (Chinese viewers) for our Bulls game," Bucks coach Larry Krystkowiak said. "As long as they're not in my ear yelling at me, it makes it pretty easy.

"It's exciting for us. It's one of the elements of being involved in this. It raises the level of awareness in a lot of ways. I think our guys know they're being watched a little bit closer and it doesn't hurt our effort at all. It creates more of a sense of urgency and accountability for all of us."

Krystkowiak's quote points to the ultimate effect China whill have on all of 'us'--they're so big that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, Americans are becoming aware that there's another country looming behind us.

We're no longer autarchists, competing against the best in each other--we're back in a race again, with a very different opponent; one in which we have a huge lead, but where the other competitor can't help but gain.

How we handle this--whether we use China as a worthy competitor pushing us to our best, whether we turn surly, whether we ignore reality, whether we lose sight of why we're running--will determine whether the 21st century ends with Americans still free to play our own game under our rules, or just another runner jockeying for oxygen.

Although you wonder with numbers like that, how long until the NBA buys into a Chinese network and starts scheduling Rockets and Bucks game for 9 a.m. EST?

AP photo of Yao and Yi by Darko Vojinovic via MSNBC

Feeding thyself

There's something about Free Rice that bothers me.

The site consists of a vocabulary game; it says for each word whose synonym you get right, "we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger".

It launched on October 7 with 830 grains of rice donated; so far today, 77,126,310 grains of rice have been donated.

Aside from the odd food aid is bad for Africa line of debate (see UN food aid 'causing chaos and violence' in Somalia for example) there's something distasteful about saying to a mostly-Western audience hey, play this game if you're bored at work--and if you do well, fewer kids in Africa will starve.

The site feeds into the whole Africa as playground for the West mentality--Africa is where we go to feel better about ourselves, to experiment, to show we're good people; no matter the intentions, it's also what we reference in opposition to 'us'.

Plus the site has a smarmy presentation method--you're playing for grains of rice. A graphic literally shows a food bowl filling up as you get each word right (they get progressively harder). It all makes me feel as if I'm throwing pennies at a beggar.

Also, the site syntax is incorrect--for example, it asks: "chomp means:
bite
heartache
kindling
currency"

Well, actually, chomp doesn't "mean" any of the other words--it has a similar meaning to bite, but if chomp meant bite, they wouldn't be two different words.

The economic model for the site is based on ads, of course; but really, like most things tying the West to Africa, the site is run off narcissism.

Uncredited rice field image found online

Reading in

There's a very-typical New Yorker article up, Future Reading. It's got all the wooly-headed prose you'd expect, as well as the sweeping generalizations that sound good and erudite but upon further puzzlement collapse like so much froth, and as always the overiding sense that the article comes as a finely-observed well-chewed dispatch from some alternate universe, so very much like ours but perhaps half a beat behind our messy timestream.

Nevertheless, some nuggets:

Cheap but durable editions like those of Bohn’s Library brought books other than the Bible into working-class households, and newspapers, which in the late nineteenth century sometimes appeared every hour, made breaking news and social commentary available across all social ranks.

Wow... so there are some-- surprisingly major--newspapers which don't update as often as their 19th century brethren!

Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.”

The article points to the Online Computer Library Center and its fascinating ">map with details on each country's library system, which leads to this observation:

Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.

Unfiltered Rummy

The Washington Post has a very interesting story out, headlined From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld . . .

The ex-Defense Secretary's words are almost surreal at times; I can't speak to how representative the quotes are, but they definitely ring true to me, based on Rumsfeld's public persona.

It's almost like he enjoyed being weird and different; there's a self-indulgent academic side to Rumsfeld that I always felt was wrong for his post, no matter how interesting he was.

Someone making literally life and death decisions really shouldn't be coming across as puckish, nor should he be out there relishing his sparring sessions with the press.

The article is a good example of classic reporting--the Post got access to previously-unavailable information, that they then use to more fully explain important past events--even though it's written in an almost casual, blog-like manner.

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

The memos, often referred to as "snowflakes," shed light on Rumsfeld's brusque management style and on his efforts to address key challenges during his tenure as Pentagon chief. Spanning from 2002 to shortly after his resignation following the 2006 congressional elections, a sampling of his trademark missives obtained yesterday reveals a defense secretary disdainful of media criticism and driven to reshape public opinion of the Iraq war.

Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other Cabinet members and White House staff members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes a day and regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy, aides said. The memos are not classified but are marked "for official use only."

There is also this, something which I wish more papers would do:

Rumsfeld declined to comment, but an aide said the points in that memo were Rumsfeld's distillation of the analysts' comments, though he added that the secretary is known for using the term "bumper stickers."

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."

Amazing play

The perfect marriage of college sports, amateur announcers and YouTube.

Mixing it up

Gleanings from Sunday's NYTimes:

A War on Every Screen, A.O. Scott:

There are other stories to tell and other ways to tell them, and Hollywood, in spite of its reputation for liberal bias, does not like to risk alienating potential ticket buyers by taking sides. This fear may be misplaced, since the highest-grossing Iraq-related movie released is also among the most polemical, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But it is remarkable that nondocumentary filmmakers consistently draw the boundary between fact and fiction in such a way that the most vexed political event of our time has its political meaning blunted.

Instead the movies supply emotion, sentiment, metaphor and abstraction. Even those bloody Iraqis at the end of “Redacted” function as symbols, since we know nothing about who they were or how they died. In other Iraq movies, including quite a few documentaries, the local population is almost entirely invisible. Films set in other contemporary war zones — Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, wherever “Rendition” is supposed to take place — manage to include more Arab and Muslim characters, but their function tends to be symbolic as well.

I think if you want perpetual war in the real world, a good way to ensure that is to pat yourself on the back for making and watching films set in other countries, while continuing to see the residents of those countries as backdrop.

Where Gods Yearn for Long-Lost Treasures, Nicolai Ouroussoff:

When this museum in Athens opens next year, hundreds of marble sculptures from the old Acropolis museum alongside the Parthenon will finally reside in a place that can properly care for them. Missing, however, will be more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, so called since they were carted off to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century.

Britain’s government maintains that they legally belong to the British Museum and insists that they will never be returned. The Greeks naturally argue that they belong in Athens.

Until now my sympathies tended to lie with the British. Most of the world’s great museum collections have some kind of dubious deals in their pasts. Why bother untangling thousands of years of imperialist history? Wise men avert their eyes and move on.

But by fusing sculpture, architecture and the ancient landscape into a forceful visual narrative, the New Acropolis Museum delivers a revelation that trumps the tired arguments and incessant flag waving by both sides. It’s impossible to stand in the top-floor galleries, in full view of the Parthenon’s ravaged, sun-bleached frame, without craving the marbles’ return.

Maybe a more accurate headline for Ouroussoff's piece would've been: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until I Yearn for Your Long-Lost Treasure.

A Teenager in Love (So-Called), Ginia Bellafante:

Television gives us teenage lust exercised or teenage lust repressed but rarely does it evoke the way young people translate their carnal urges into something they understand as a deeper abiding affection. “My So-Called Life” is essentially a study of a young mind processing desire into something less terrifying and more easily justified — substantiating it with false hopes — and in that regard it is more than a good TV show, it is a good TV show that attains the dimension and complexity of literature. The great postwar novels of adolescence deal with innocence lost; “My So-Called Life” deals with innocence sustained, but it offers a no-less-illuminating view of what it is to be young because of it.

The series, created by Winnie Holzman for the producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Hershkovitz, all of whom had worked on “Thirtysomething,” arrived before television began catering so aggressively to teenage tastes. Perhaps its morose and ragged appeal is best appreciated against the backdrop of what followed, an endless stream of teenage dramas — some good, some awful — that both recall and point it up as an essay embalmed in time about a way of being 15 that no one will ever experience again.

The balance of the review is the kind of self-indulgent sloppy valentine that makes you cringe when read in print, even if you happen to share Bellafante's enthusiasm for Claire Danes' "acting". Still, it's nice to see MSCL appreciated all over again, on the anniversary of the release of what sounds like the definitive DVD collection.

She’s Famous (and So Can You), Guy Trebay. Buried halfway through Trebay's uncharacteristically-interesting article--about Tila Tequila not Stephen Colbert (not that you'd be able to guess from the headline)--is this:

By the standards of the new “Jackass” landscape, traditional stardom, with its career building stations-of-the-cross, its rigid talent requirements, its “Entourage” shtick, seems clunky and out of step with a culture so much more fluid now that a hit record — like the recent Internet sensation “I’ll Kill Him,” by Soko — could emerge from a young French woman’s bedroom and MySpace page.

It turns out the song is actually I'll Kill Her--below--and it's pretty good. Although I wonder now that we live in the age of say everything anytime whether the kick of the song's title and lyrics exists for fewer and fewer of us.



Trebay's piece is worth reading; there's this:

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

“Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer” even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. “There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite.”

And it ends with this:

“Whether you think Tila Tequila is corny or not, she already has a certain legitimacy to her name,” said Roger Gastman, the editor of Swindle magazine, an indie journal and Web site. Its most recent issue has Death and Fame as its theme. Tila Tequila may have “started out very niche, but she has crossed over to the mainstream,” said Mr. Gastman, citing what he termed “a body of work” including a Maxim cover, a hit show, a MySpace page that now links to a site offering guidance on how to become like her. “Tila could probably do signings at comic book conventions forever if she wanted to,” Mr. Gastman said.

And this would undoubtedly suit Ms. Tequila, for whom fame, she said, was never actually so much the goal as was fulfilling her love for acting and dancing and stripping and modeling and singing and, not incidentally, escaping the limited career growth available to someone who not long ago was posing half-naked on car hoods.

“The press and the media have glorified the celebrity thing and brainwashed people to live in that world,” Ms. Tequila said. “People try to stand out for nothing and they end up getting quote-unquote famous. I’m not into that at all. If you’re just into fame for fame, I’m like, ‘O.K., but what are you good at? What can you actually do?’”

Uncredited photo of Tequila via Vietnam.net.

Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts, Mireya Navarro:

Like many parents, Mr. Rodriquez, a computer consultant, and his wife, Sarina, 37, a laboratory manager, are adjusting to a world that increasingly requires them to pay for their children’s computer play. Meanwhile, they are trying to figure out whether there is any reason to buy magical powers or virtual sunglasses.

The money-driven aspect of the games, whether involving actual or virtual cash, is becoming a concern for parents and consumer watchdogs as popular game sites like Club Penguin attract millions of new users. The number of unique monthly visitors to Club Penguin more than doubled in the last year, to 4.7 million from 1.9 million, while the traffic on Webkinz.com grew to 6 million visitors from less than 1 million, according to comScore Media Metrix, which tracks online usage.

What a great headline... if you read the rest of the article you find out it's not literally accurate, but it totally captures the story in seven words.

Times feeding racism

The article's about racism in Switzerland--but because the New York Times, too, believes only white people are Swiss, the "Swiss Rage" in the headline refers not to the Swiss targets of racism--but the Swiss perpetrators.

Immigration, Black Sheep and Swiss Rage: The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.

“To Create Security,” the poster reads.

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government, an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party, or SVP. It has been distributed in a mass mailing to Swiss households, reproduced in newspapers and magazines and hung as huge billboards across the country. ...

“Our political enemies think the poster is racist, but it just gives a simple message,” Bruno Walliser, a local chimney sweep running for Parliament on the party ticket, said at the rally, held on a Schwerzenbach farm outside Zurich. “The black sheep is not any black sheep that doesn’t fit into the family. It’s the foreign criminal who doesn’t belong here, the one that doesn’t obey Swiss law. We don’t want him.” ...

Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes.

The party’s political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and threatening the very identity of the country.

Unlike the situation in France, where the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned for president in the spring alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP has taken a much cruder us-against-them approach.

In a short three-part campaign film, “Heaven or Hell,” the party’s message is clear. In the first segment, young men inject heroin, steal handbags from women, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives and carry off a young woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland — women in head scarves; men sitting, not working.

The third segment shows “heavenly” Switzerland: men in suits rushing to work, logos of Switzerland’s multinational corporations, harvesting on farms, experiments in laboratories, scenes of lakes, mountains, churches and goats. “The choice is clear: my home, our security,” the film states.

Obama under the arch

So somewhere between 15,000 to 25,000 New Yorkers crammed into Washington Square park yesterday to hear Barack Obabama, an especially notable figure given that NYC is supposed to be Hillary territory. As the Times hints at, the rally may mark a shift in the campaign:

Senator Barack Obama implored thousands of admirers who gathered last night in New York City to set aside their distrust in politics and believe in the long-term possibility of his presidential candidacy even though, he conceded, “there are easier choices to make in this election.”

In a giant rally in the backyard of Senator Hillary Rodham, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, drew distinctions between himself and his leading rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, insisting that only a fresh candidate could truly change Washington. Twice, he singled out Mrs. Clinton. ...

Mr. Obama, bathed in bright flood lights as he stood on a stage before a crowd stretching across Washington Square Park, struck a sharper tone than he has through much of his campaign, particularly when he stands alongside his Democratic rivals. The arguments he made, before an audience of supporters, were not articulated during a debate one night earlier.

“There were folks on the stage that said Social Security is just fine, we don’t have to do anything about it,” Mr. Obama said last night. “There are those who will tell you that getting out of Iraq will be painless, we’ll do it in a snap, not acknowledging that there are no good options in Iraq. There are folks who will shift positions and policies on all kinds of things depending on which way the wind is blowing. That’s not the kind of politics that will deliver on the change we are looking for.”

The racially diverse crowd included Obama devotees who said they came specifically to increase attendance; Greenwich Village residents who had heard the commotion and followed it with dogs and yoga mats in tow; and nostalgists who beamed at the sight of thousands of mostly young people filling the park for a liberal, antiwar cause.

Some telling quotes, via Gothamist:

An NYU freshman told the Washington Square News, "Barack Obama is the most gangster politician to ever come to Washington" and that "Hell yeah!" he would vote for him, while a 72-year-old registered Republican told the Columbia Spectator that she would be voting Democrat no matter what, "We’re in a very, very serious time now with our safety and our freedoms."

Talk is cheap, of course, and Obama's challenge is going to be to get these young voters who love nothing better than spouting off to actually drag themselves to the polls come primary or caucus day. As Real Clear Politics puts it,

While polls have Obama running behind [in Iowa], [Campaign manager David] Plouffe argues that the campaign will benefit from a "hidden vote," meaning youth and others who don't typically vote in primaries. Those voters, pollsters know, don't actually vote in most primaries, so the pollsters set up "screens" to weed them out of samples. Plouffe may be right, Obama may have a great deal more support than he shows in public polls. But there's a reason pollsters say youth and others don't vote in primaries: They don't, typically. For any campaign to rely on a population like that to win a primary can be very dangerous.

Clinton's definitely been on a roll as of late--she's running a tight, disciplined campaign, and has been benefiting from the growing sense that she cannot be sense, even if Obama continues to outraise her (which may not happen in the third quarter).

But I still think Obama has a real shot at winning the nomination--he's got the kind of charisma that I think will, in the end, win over voters in the retail politics environment of Iowa and New Hampshire.

You like him when you're exposed to him; he's just got to convince enough voters to vote their hearts. The Times article concludes with the challenge and the opportunity:

Sophie Ragir, 18, a Columbia freshman, said, “It’s a social thing. Everyone on my floor was, like, are you going to the Obama thing?”

Leyla Biltsted, 60, who is retired and lives in Manhattan, said, “I’ve never heard such a wonderful visionary speech as he did at the Democratic convention. That brought me hope.” She added: “Now, I’m waiting to see what’s behind the vision, how he’s going to implement it, who he’s going to surround himself with. We don’t vote for a little while yet; I’m on a fishing trip.”

Obama photo from Obama campaign's Flickr photostream.

Modern love fable

Online couple cheated with each other, Daily Telegraph of Australia:

A married couple who didn't realise they were chatting each other up on the internet are divorcing.

Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported.

The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.

"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said.

Adnan, 32, said: "I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years".

Picking away

Some great works for classical guitar, inspired by Virginia Heffernan's (ugh!) blog post on meeting "Funtwo", aka Jeong-Hyun Lim, aka YouTube guitar legend.

The funniest part of her post, incidentally, was this:

But most importantly, to me:

3. He asked me why, in Auckland, New Zealand, the only people interested in neoclassical shred solo guitar work–as he is–were other Koreans? The Europeans, he said, only seemed to want to listen to Green Day and post-punk. Why not the complex digital stuff, like Dream Theater (his example)?

I ventured a couple of answers, and then he blew me out of the water with a reply that seemed to explain the earth, the universe and everything.

At the very least, it explained Asian attention to technique versus European expressionism. Wow.

Uh, okay; she leaves it at that, I guess like she says we'll have to read her piece Monday to find out what his reply was, and read more about Virginia's reduction of cultures to: Europe creative, Asia methodical.

(Even as we live in a video game age dominated by designers from Asia).

Pachelbel's Canon in D


Funtwo's version is absolutely amazing; it has 28,245,680 views, 5th all-time on YouTube. it's funny reading comments from the kids who have no idea what piece this is. Like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and 10 Things I Hate About You, I'm all for modern updates of classics--which themselves were often contemporary takes on the ancients.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons

Funtwo again, playing the Summer movement. I think he should join forces with the East Village Opera Company and tour the country on a twin bill playing the classics.

Asturias movement from Isaac Albéniz's Suite Española


Played by Andrés Segovia, considered the father of the modern classical guitar.

Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez




Rodrigo's a blind Spanish composer who died in 1999; his piece, as Wikipedia notes, sounds older than it is, like something out of the Moorish 15th century. The lyric, soaring second movement is so unlike the first, which is pleasing in its own right. This version is played by John Williams with the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Paganini's Caprice no. 24


Su Meng plays the piece generally heard on a violin.

Not fun and games

It's hard to underestimate the impact on people's views of the blaring headlines and media frenzy that accompanies a 'scandal'. Things get seared into the collective psyche--Wen Ho Lee was a spy, Richard Jewell the Olympic bomber, Iraq behind 9/11--that defy future developments or corrections, which never get the level of saturation of the original.

It's not just a matter of going with what we know at the time, either; certain people and countries never get the benefit of the doubt, aren't treated as 'us' and therefore prejudices are allowed to run roughshod over the unnatural-feeling task of restraint and the unsexy act of deliberation.

You can blame the media for sensationalism, or going for cheap ratings--but then you're divesting yourself of responsibility for the prejudices that allowed you to swallow the story in the first place.

Why didn't your gut tell you that something was being overhyped? Why didn't you have a sense that something was amiss? Because the story fit all too neatly into your map of the world.

Journalists as simply people; there are formal processes and structures set up so their flaws don't get magnified into print or air, and for the most part these safeguards work.

However, where they fall down is when journalists assume something is so obvious that they don't consciously think to question it--the everybody knows Iraq has WMDs, everybody wants to be patriotic in a time of war, nobody wants to second-guess the military while Americans are dying mentality that didn't get shaken until the horrors of reality became impossible to process within the existing frame.

By then, of course, it's too late; you have a small number of people telling you I told you so, while everybody else is in denial and the media starts looking for villains--if only Dr. Freud were around to indict all of us (or our mothers).

All this comes to mind with an article in today's Times, Mattel Apologizes to China for Recalls .

U.S.-based toy giant Mattel Inc. issued an extraordinary apology to China on Friday over the recall of Chinese-made toys, taking the blame for design flaws and saying it had recalled more lead-tainted toys than justified.

The gesture by Thomas A. Debrowski, Mattel's executive vice president for worldwide operations, came in a meeting with Chinese product safety chief Li Changjiang, at which Li upbraided the company for maintaining weak safety controls.

''Our reputation has been damaged lately by these recalls,'' Debrowski told Li in a meeting at Li's office at which reporters were allowed to be present.

''And Mattel takes full responsibility for these recalls and apologizes personally to you, the Chinese people, and all of our customers who received the toys,'' Debrowski said. ...

Mattel ordered three high-profile recalls this summer involving more than 21 million Chinese-made toys, including Barbie doll accessories and toy cars because of concerns about lead paint and tiny magnets that could be swallowed.

The recalls have prompted complaints from China that manufacturers were being blamed for design faults introduced by Mattel.

On Friday, Debrowski acknowledged that ''vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel's design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China's manufacturers.''

Lead-tainted toys accounted for only a small percentage of all toys recalled, he said, adding that: ''We understand and appreciate deeply the issues that this has caused for the reputation of Chinese manufacturers.''

In a statement issued by the company, Mattel said its lead-related recalls were ''overly inclusive, including toys that may not have had lead in paint in excess of the U.S. standards.

''The follow-up inspections also confirmed that part of the recalled toys complied with the U.S. standards,'' the statement said, without giving specific figures.

The co-owner of the company that supplied the lead-tainted toys to Mattel, Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd., committed suicide in August shortly after the recall was announced.

It's the third item on the Times' website; and buried among headlines everywhere else.

It seemed obvious to me when it all broke a few weeks ago that Mattel's campaign blaming China was ridiculous. The problems were so widespread and the recall so big it clearly wasn't the result of some rogue factory--Mattel, thus, was guilty of a systematic failure to properly oversee its own products.

But it fed so well into the China-bashing that's become part of our culture that everyone ate it up. We already all think of China as the Wild West; there's already a significant part of Americans who are bigoted against the Chinese, a racism with hundreds of years of formal and de facto roots in the U.S.

Stir that in with an all-American company like Mattel's motivation to deflect blame, and our underriding fear of being overtaken by the Chinese juggernaut, and you have a scapegoat.

Notice that the retraction was made in China, by the way--if Mattel were serious about it, they should take out full-page ads and buy airtime in the American media, because left to its own whims this isn't nearly as sexy a story for 'free media' as the original charges.

This isn't to say China doesn't have serious, 'The Jungle'-type problems. But let's not use that as a whitewash for the very-American problems of corporate malfeasance and lack of oversight that Mattel should become the poster child for.

Of course, this being China, you also have this:

Li reminded Debrowski that ''a large part of your annual profit ... comes from your factories in China.

''This shows that our cooperation is in the interests of Mattel, and both parties should value our cooperation. I really hope that Mattel can learn lessons and gain experience from these incidents,'' Li said, adding that Mattel should ''improve their control measures.''

Maybe Mattel can write some self-criticisms.

Or maybe we, as the American people, should examine why we find it so easy to see Muslims as terrorists, curse Indians for bad tech support, demean the Japanese (did you miss the profound racism in Lost in Translation?), ignore Africa, look down on illegal immigrants.

These things shouldn't come so easy to us, shouldn't be such a familiar narrative frame; they shouldn't go unquestioned, seeped up in the air around us--and we shouldn't blame the media for tapping into our national neuroses.

Jim Young photo from Reuters via MSNBC

Our face to the world

I was struck today by how invisible the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has become.

I couldn't even remember who the current ambassador is; ah, yes, Zalmay Khalilzad, of course--you'd think the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration would have a higher media profile, but then again, how many people can name the two Muslims who won Nobel prizes this year?

It really is odd that the Bushies aren't putting Khalilzad out there more, given the amount of discussion of Islam and the level of ignorance and bigotry regularly paraded by politicians, pundits and officials. You'd think the one-eyed man would be king in the land of the blind.

And he does have some interesting thoughts; George Packer posted on his New Yorker blog some excerpts from an interview he did with Khalilzad:

Khalilzad sees the Iranian regime as ambitious, insecure, and, above all, divided among “multiple players.” But there are two basic points on which Iran’s leaders agree:

"One is that Iraq should not return to be a rival in the balance of power in the Gulf, that it shouldn’t play that role. A Shia preëminence in Iraq, or a Shia dominance with a not-so-centralized government, gives Iran that. Iraq will be more internally preoccupied, more friendly, so it helps your regionally preëminent role. This is something the Iranians, regardless of whether you’re a monarch or a religious fellow, share: the belief that Iran is a great civilization.
Second is the Iranians’ great fear of us, but they see an opportunity at the same time. Great fear because if we have it easy in Iraq they could be next, and sometimes the rhetoric from some people here gives them that impression. There is no substance to it, but the rhetoric gives that impression. That concern would lead them to make it difficult for us, and get us out ultimately. The other part is the opportunity: that they would get a broader understanding with us, a kind of recognition of Iran, of the preëminence of Iran. Iran’s role in the region would be accepted by us and legitimated. It’s Iran and the U.S. that decide what happens in the region, which reinforces the impression of preëminence. Iran and the U.S. are sitting and discussing Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon. On the one hand, Iran is very self-assured, but on the other it’s very insecure. That’s a Shia psychology, unfortunately.

They don’t believe that we will leave. Maybe they are beginning to. But they do mirror-imaging rather than reading our politics correctly. What they think is: Would we want to leave an oil-rich country? My god, Baghdad, this is one of the seats of one of the great world empires, right in the middle of the Gulf."

I don't agree with all of Khalilzad's thoughts on Iran--as an ethnic Pashtun he's likely prone to an (understandable) inferiority complex when it comes to Persians--but I do agree that the Iranians see our invasion of Iraq as driven by a desire to control oil, and threaten Iran (and help Israel).

Thus they filter our actions there as the timeless acts of an imperial power, which they have thousands of years of experience dealing with and acting as.

My general view when foreigners or myopic liberals decry the American empire is that we are nothing like an empire--otherwise, where are the tributes, the taxes, the fawning, the begging, from our subject states?

Wikipedia has rankings of world empires by various measures that includes America--it's interesting to see how highly we rank historically, without even trying. I think that's what drives Europeans, in particular, crazy about us--their ancestors scrapped, fought and cheated to get their hands on as much land and wealth as possible. I'm not sure they understand a people who are inherently so powerful that we feel no need to do the same.

But in the vein of our invisible UN ambassador, the Bush administration does seem to have adopted the mindset of an empire, without accruing to us any of its 'benefits'.

Whereas once the post of UN ambassador was the province of lions of American thought and politics like Henry Cabot Lodge, Adlai Stevenson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Andrew Young, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and even Madeleine Albright, under Bush et al it's become a revolving door of misfits.

So far, Bush Jr., whose own father represented the U.S. at the UN, has had as many ambassadors as years he's been in office:

-James B. Cunningham (acting)
-John D. Negroponte
-John Danforth
-Anne W. Patterson (acting)
-John R. Bolton
-Alejandro Daniel Wolff (acting)
-Zalmay Khalilzad

Given that the U.S. has had a total of 26 ambassadors since the UN was founded in San Francisco in 1945, more than 25% of them have served under GWB!

It's an astonishing stat; and is a pretty strong indicator of how little the present administration values the views of the rest of the world, even as our percentage of the world's economy continues to drop (from an inconceivable 46% after WWII to a still amazing 25-30% now).

We're going to pay a price for this. Simple statistics tell you that when the U.S. makes up just 5% of the world population, everything else being equal we're likely to not know everything. And things are becoming more equal even as we veer more unilateral.

The UN may not necessarily be the best forum for the U.S. to interface with the rest of the world--NATO and APEC have some pretty significant advantages in efficiency and efficacy.

But the idea of the UN is unique; given our founding role in a post-war world where nations willingly negotiate away congenital advantages in exchange for systemic stability, it'd be a tragedy if through arrogance and xenophobia we found ourselves midwives of a world where norms and predictability are replaced by the force of ideology and individuals.

That, after all, is what Al-Qaeda seeks.

Uncredited photo of Khalilzad and Bush from the U.S. State Department.

Bad headline writing

The headline and summary sentence on the homepage of the Washington Post (at the moment):

Warner Seeks Senate Seat in '08

Former Va. governor to announce Thursday that he plans to run for seat vacated by John Warner.

What, it'd have killed them to include a 'Mark' in the headline?!

Good music

At some point, Kate Nash is gonna become big; Maz Azria used one of her songs, Merry Happy, for his show at fashion week, it was totally infectious and was stuck in my head all day.

It's hard finding a non-mushy version of her song online, but try this (the funny lyrics are here):



There's a slower, not as great version but cleaner audio on her Myspace page; which also has her catchy song Foundation. The rest of her music is good, too.

NYC: Comedy capital of the world

From Overheard in New York, we learn kids (and vendors) say the craziest things....

Mom: I need a size 'Small.'
Little girl, loudly: Mommy, aren't you a Large?

Ice cream vendor: Why don't you go for it? You are eating for two!
Woman: I am not eating for two.

Rude famous guy: Do you know who I am?!
Waitress: No... But I know your type...

Bimbette: Look, it's not like I mind tall, dark, and handsome, but it's like, 'Look at me -- I'm hot... I should be able to nab a nerd.'
Friend: Nerds aren't like shoes -- you can't just try them on for size. They have feelings, too.
Bimbette: And glasses.

Hefty guy: Excuse me, I really need to go to the bathroom. Can I go in front of you?
Woman in front of him in line: I'm in a rush, too.
Hefty guy, to no one: Can you believe this city? Everyone is in a rush. Everyone is rude. I just need to go to the bathroom... No one will ever help you out.
Woman in front of him: Sir, you are the one that is being rude.
Hefty guy, yelling: I am not a sir, I am a ma'am! [Silence ensues.]

Man: Excuse me, miss, do you have the time?
Girl with headphones: No thanks, I have a boyfriend.

Seven-year-old girl: I'm going to see a movie this weekend. Can anyone guess what I'm going to see?
Seven-year-old boy: Ratatouille! I already saw it.
Seven-year-old girl: Yeah, I'm going to go see Ratatouille this weekend.
Seven-year-old boy: Yeah, I already saw it. And there's this one part -- yuck -- you don't want to see it. It's bad, you really don't want to see that part -- it's gross. [Whispers it to another kid.]
Seven-year-old girl: What? Is there kissing? I can see kissing... If you think I've never seen kissing before, there's kissing in every other movie I have ever seen in my life!

Suit, embarrassed after tapping man on shoulder: ... Sorry, I thought I knew you [starts to walk away].
Man he tapped: I'm your cousin!

Guy: So, when did you guys get married?
Husband: March.
Wife, at same time: May.
Husband: Uh-oh.

High school kid #1: I've never been to Staten Island.
High school kid #2: It's weird -- there are random delis in between houses.

Hot dog vendor: How you like it?
Tourist: Just ketchup, please.
Hot dog vendor: You not like New York style?
Tourist: Sure, but not today.
Hot dog vendor, reluctantly handing over dog: I think you make very big mistake today, sir, and every day, too.

List of best fiction series

There's nothing like the thrill of discovering an amazing novel that's the first in a series, knowing thousands of pages of an alternate world lie ahead of you.

It's interesting seeing how characters grow as authors themselves mature through years and sometimes decades; it gives you an almost personal connection to the author, especially if read in real time. Plus there's a real sense of comfort dipping into a familiar world at will, which lends itself to rereading.

Not to mention a good series gives you something to hunt bookstores for.

Below is the beginning of a list of my favorite fiction series; it's weighed toward science fiction, because the genre tends to spawn series and because I seem to have read a lot of it in recent years.

I'm generally defining series as any multiple books by one author containing commmon characters, and/or internal references to previous works. (Number in parentheses is how many times I've read the series).

-Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin historical fiction series (once)
Nominally about a British captain and ship's doctor during the Napoleonic wars, as I've written before these twenty books are like a male version of Jane Austen's novels, with all the insights into character and humor that her works contain. They're among the best contemporary writing of any kind I've read; it's a shame O'Brian died recently, just as the books were gaining a significant mainstream following (with the likes of a Times reviewer tagging it the best historical novels, ever). This is my standard suggestion for friends looking to get some guy (especially) in their life a gift. The first chapter of the first book speaks for itself.

-J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings fantasy series (four/five times)
Britain may have long lost its status as a world power, but it's still dominant when it comes to creating alternate worlds--and Tolkien's three LOTR novels (plus the Hobbit) have long been the gold standard. His Middle Earth is so detailed it feels as if the novels are just one path through it; now if they could only make a decent movie out of it.

-Issac Asimov's Foundation science fiction series (twice)
This trilogy turned heptalogy (plus there are an additional eight novels roughly set in the same universe) follows a series of heroes as they meddle with the politics of man, robots and empires 50,000 years in the future. They can be a bit comic-booky, but are by far the most influential of science fiction works--everything goes back to Asimov. It's even spawned the name for at leastone real world tech company .

-Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children/Shame/Satanic Verses fiction series (twice, once, once)
I habitually cite Rushdie as among my favorite contemporary writers, on the basis of the three books above (which may not technically be a series, but to me their magical realism exploration of religion, identity and India are strongly interdependant) and his "children's" book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He's startingly yet casually insightful--I always feel like any one of many of his seemingly-throw-away lines would be the basis for an entire story by a lesser writer. Rushdie's overflowing in every sense of the word; nobody belongs in Shakespeare's category, but when I read Rushdie I have a similar sense of multiple thoughts dancing on the head of a pin.

-Orson Scott Card's Ender science fiction series (twice for Ender's Game, once for rest)
These eight novels (and counting) have grown in ambition and scope along with the boy that first appeared in Ender's Game, set at a training school for child soldiers around 2165. Card, in my view, is our leading science fiction thinker (along with Neal Stephenson). He explores honestly and without blinders what we call multiculturalism, which is simply the universe in his books. Ender's Game is in a class of its own because of its inventive plot, but the themes explored in Speaker for the Dead is more representative of the author Card has become.

-Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk fiction series (once)
Until his death almost exactly a year ago, Nobel prize winner Mahfouz was considered the leading writer of the Arab world; in my estimation, he's also one of the (necessarily) few writers who will be read generations from now--the way he captures character and evokes emotion is usually compared to Dickens. His Palace Walk trilogy, set in 1950s Cario, is pre-Islamic in the sense that although the specifics of that religion plays a role in the series, the themes are broadly universal ones of love, family and man's place in society. It's unfortunate the trilogy isn't required reading in American schools, instead of some of the token multicultural works that are notable only for their clumsiness.

-Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea fantasy series (twice for original trilogy, once for rest)
I think LeGuin's the most literate of science fiction writers, a field traditionally known for interesting ideas embodied by wooden characters via clunky prose. I don't think it's a coincidence that she's one of the few female sci fi writers; her grasp of character and nuance is poetic. She reminds me of Georgia O'Keefe in how varied her works are in their greatness, from the stark exploration of ideas in the Left Hand of Darkness to the charming world of dragons and people spun in the five Earthsea novels and a collection of short stories. As is typical in series, she wrote the initial trilogy in six years, then after they found acclaim wrote the final three works after a 16-year gap. Incidentally, LeGuin wrote an interesting article about her unhappiness with the Sci Fi Channel's decision to whitewash Earthsea in their television miniseries.

-Frank Herbert's Dune science fiction series (twice for first book, once for rest)
I've only read the first three of the six ecologically-themed Dune books Herbert wrote, all set in the distant future and centering around the species-altering 'spice' of a desert planet (with, I think, aspects of Islam/Christianity). The drop-off between the amazing first and very good second book is noticeable, and becomes severe by the end of the not-bad third book.

-J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter genre-busting series (three or two times for most, once for last)
I'm curious as to whether this becomes a series all kids grow up with, perhaps alongside (or muscling out) the likes of Narnia. I definitely plan on reading it to my kids... well, at least the first few of the seven.

-Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials fantasy series (twice)
Compared most often to his arch-nemesis forebearer C.S. Lewis, Pullman can stand on his own--and for an adult, at least, I think his Paradise Lost-inspired trilogy about teens, their daemons and their souls is more rewarding, if less traditional. Like many of the authors on this list, Pullman follows in the footsteps of H.G. Wells in asking you to suspend disbelief about one thing; once you accept his conception of a world in which people's partner animals embody a literal second half to their selves, everything else flows with internal logic. Plus, his kids are neither annoying mini-adults nor infantile vessels for cloying set pieces.

-John LeCarre's George Smiley thriller novels (twice for some, none others)
I've often said LeCarre is the most literate writer of thrillers (more so than Graham Greeene even), especially once you get past the first two hundred establishing pages. He's best known for The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (which is the one book I'd recommend to a space alien who wants to understand the Cold War), but since this is a list of series he's here for the five spy novels that center around Smiley (only three of which I knew about).

-Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective series (twice)
As I've written before, I don't think the four novels that make up the Holmes series quite live up to their reputation. But the stories are so inventive and the sense of 19th century Britain so exact that I still put Holmes at the top of the detective genre.

-Christopher Paolini's Inheritance fantasy series(twice)
I guess Paolini's 24 by now; he was just 19 when Eragon, the first of a planned trilogy about a boy/then young adult and his dragon, came out. As I wrote before, there are traces of his age in his at-times clunky writing, but he's got a first-rate imagination. The last book in his series is due out sometime soon (hopefully).

-John Fitzgerald's Great Brain historical fiction series (few times, as a kid)
These eight (! I only thought there were three!) books set in frontier Utah about a boy and his active brother may have been my favorite growing up. They had an irresistible mix of humor and classic action, and lots of interesting scheming.

-Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr detective series (once for most)
I read most of Block's ten books about a suave Manhattan-based burglar as a kid; they convey pretty well what a certain strata of people are like in NYC, with the sense of skimming lightly through life, conversant with culture and the arts even if not drinking deeply of them. These are a fun read; they're on the list mainly for nostalgic reasons, not great literature but about the best of what's become a horrific detective genre.

-C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series (twice)
As I've mentioned before, I reread these books recently and was a bit disappointed that, in contrast with my glowing childhood memories, the Oxford prof's seven books about kids whisked into a fairytale land weren't that good, and were perhaps actively harmful. It's on the list anyway because I think they're worth reading, maybe as a kid and in conjunction with Pullman's works.

-Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series (twice some, none most)
I thought about not putting this series on the list, because McCaffrey (and now her son) has essentially taken a great first few novels and spun them into dross, at 18 works and counting. But I loved reading Dragonflight/quest/song as a kid, and all three held up upon more recent rereading. (It's interesting, by the way, how Wikipedia's entry on Pern is barely distinguishable from its entries on real countries/planets; it's like a dry run for the discovery of alien civilizations).

-Other series that I've liked, but would put below the 'classics' tier:

-Roger Zelzany's Amber sci fi series
-Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever fantasy series
-James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small veterinary series
-Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan thriller series
-Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller series
-Larry Niven's Ringworld sci fi series (I've read just the first two of four, the original novel's first half was great, rest wasn't bad)
-Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars sci fi series
-And a whole host of other childhood favorites, like Tom Swift, Encylopedia Brown, Beverly Cleary's, works, etc.

On a related note, there's a running users-generated list of the top 100 Sci-Fi Books; it includes ever sci fi series I've listed, although not in the order which I rank them.

I've read all of the top twenty save two (#4 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and #19 Hyperion), all of the top fifty but ten others... odd, especially since I never read any science fiction as a kid.