May 2006 Archives
What's on the telly?
Dad blogs about the TV going away; Mum blogs about the TV coming back. Apparently it was necessary for the World Cup, which means the grown-ups caved before the kids forced them to. Are there no pubs in Berkeley?
I do have a television, which is connected to a DVD player, but it's not connected to any TV. Which is fine by me. Watched Out of Sight on DVD tonight. It's kinda perfect, judged on it own merits. If I ran a rep cinema, I'd screen it as a double feature with Ghost Dog.
Posted by Felix at 23:54 EST | Comments (1)
The truth about Snack Dragon
Eater has it half right: the amazing, wonderful, fabulous, incredible, delicious Snack Dragon Taco Shack on Avenue B and 3rd Street is no longer. The Taco Shack is dead; long live the Taco Shack!
For yes, the Snack Dragon Taco Shack has been reborn, sexier than ever, in... wait for it... Coney Island!
And there are plans afoot to relocate the Avenue B Shack, possibly as nearby as across the street.
Why did the old Shack close? Yes, it did get some grief from the city, but that was being worked out. The real reason is that the owner of the building decided she didn't want it there, and threatened to close down Ben's Deli if he didn't evict the Shack from the premises. It's all very sad.
Posted by Felix at 23:19 EST | Comments (0)
Waiting for a new computer
Things have come to a pretty pass when Apple's entry-level laptop (which doesn't even officially support Final Cut Pro and runs it in a slowed-down simulation mode) handily beats a dual-processor G5 desktop machine running Final Cut Pro natively. Me, I don't have a dual-processor G5. Nothing close. I have a single-processor G4, which has been through the wars somewhat and is beginning to show its age.
Over the weekend, it started making nasty clicking noises and crashing, which was a bit disconcerting. I thought about replacing it with a Mac Mini and an external hard drive, but I don't trust external hard drives for day-to-day work, and in any case there's always an annoying lag when you want something off one and the computer has to tell the hard drive to start up again.
In the short term, I managed to fix most of the problem much more cheaply, by buying a $9.99 can of air at my local hardware store, opening up my G4 (one of the great things about the G4, how easily it opens up), and giving it a good spray. No more crashes or clicking. But it still slows down especially when I have my RSS reader open, which is a bit of a usage hog. And my scratch disk, where I keep my pictures and music, is rapidly approaching capacity.
So in the medium term I fully expect and intend to get myself a new desktop computer. But it certainly seems silly to get a G5, which is pretty much obsolete already, the eye-popping price tags notwithstanding. And if OS 10.5 Leopard comes out at WWDC in August, then I should definitely wait until then. The question is: will Steve Jobs finally round out the Apple product line and replace the G5 with an Intel machine in August? And if not, how long are we going to have to wait for these things to come out?
Posted by Felix at 23:03 EST | Comments (2)
New Yorker fact-checking
What's happened to the legendary fact-checkers and copy-editing at the New Yorker? Flicking through this week's issue, I first stumbled across a reference to USAID in a piece on telenovelas by Hanna Rosin. Now the New Yorker has a thing about acronyms: if you spell them out letter by letter, you put them in uppercase with full stops after each letter: U.S.A. But if they're acronyms proper, and pronounced as words, as in Aids for instance, you put them in small caps. (I'm not even going to try to get small caps to work in HTML, you'll have to imagine it.)
In the New Yorker this week, we get a complete abomination: U.S. is in uppercase, and then there's a space, and then AID is in small caps. I see no justification for the space; the only conceivable justification for the small caps is that the name of the agency is pronounced "US Aid".
But it isn't. USAID is pronounced U-S-A-I-D. And so the New Yorker should have written it, New Yorker-style, U.S.A.I.D.
Shaken by this uncharacteristic lapse, we then flick further on, to the long and uninformative profile of Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony. What do we find?
With none of Sony's productions values, Bill Gates, the C.E.O. of Microsoft, had held forth on the same stage for an hour and a half, and his off-the-cuff responses to questions from the audience were received as if he were Yoda or the chairman of the Fed.
Notice the major cockup there? It's the C.E.O. part, of course. The full stops are in all the right places, but, er, Bill Gates isn't the CEO of Microsoft, he hasn't been for over six years, and he certainly wasn't CEO when he gave the January 2006 speech in Las Vegas that Mark Singer is writing about. Given that a major theme of Singer's article is the competition between Sony (Playstation) and Microsoft (XBox), one would think that he could get their respective CEOs right.
Posted by Felix at 10:44 EST | Comments (4)
Let's go Auntie-bashing!
Let's say there's a virtually unregulated business, open to all comers in the private sector, in which a state-owned company, which receives subsidies from the state, competes. We all know that state-owned companies are pretty inefficient, so the private sector is likely to enter the competitive fray anyway. But once it does, it's a bit rich to then start complaining about how unfair it is that the private sector has to compete with that state-owned operator.
But complain the private sector does, at great length, especially when the British parliament is about to decide on the rate of increase of the BBC license fee. If you want to see every "whingeing Pom" stereotype confirmed, just read that article. Look what you find:
The BBC is experimenting with ultra-local TV reports, where areas with a population of about 1 million get a 10-minute news report each day. Apparently, if this takes off, then local radio stations and local newspapers will go bust, and it will all be the fault of the BBC.
The BBC is working on its website. This could kill the internet, at least according to Jon Gisby, media vice-president for Yahoo Europe, who says:
If implemented, the BBC’s proposals could have a big impact on products that are already commercially available and could stifle innovation and prevent new business models and partnerships emerging in an increasingly global market.
And the list goes on. Condé Nast complains about the BBC's magazines. Commercial radio stations complain about BBC radio. Music labels complain about the BBC offering music on the BBC website. And Philippe Cayla, the chairman of commercial TV operation Euro News, complains about BBC World:
Our view is that the BBC would do better for its licence-fee payers if it went into partnership with Euro News rather than tried to develop BBC World any further, especially in Europe. It would be far cheaper, and would avoid unnecessary competition.
Ah yes. Competition is a bad thing, and should be allowed only if strictly necessary. So remind me why Euro News is allowed to operate again?
The BBC is one of the things that Britain does really well, and its website, in particular, is excellent. If the BBC owns an orchestra – in fact it owns quite a few – then it makes all the sense in the world to promote classical music by offering free downloads now and then. This is good for the classical music industry. But of course one shouldn't take anything in the article at face value, since it appears in a Murdoch paper, and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of BSkyB, is the BBC's biggest competitor. All's fair in media and competition, I guess.
Posted by Felix at 23:06 EST | Comments (0)
Vive la France
So Californian wines are still the best, say the experts. That's good news for those of us on budgets. As Mike Steinberger notes,
This new Judgment of Paris comes at a time when a large segment of the French wine industry is mired in crisis—a crisis that might have been mitigated had the French not ignored the message of the first Judgment of Paris. France is currently sitting on an ocean of unsold wine, a glut that has led to a collapse in prices at the cheaper end of the spectrum.
When I started buying wine on a regular basis, 15 years ago, it almost never occurred to me to buy anything French. Australia, of course. Italy, Spain, perhaps. Argentina, South Africa, New Zealand? No problem. But French was overpriced and fuddy-duddy and basically only good for Champagne.
When I moved to America in 1997, nothing really changed, although writing about Latin America for a living was partly responsible for a large uptick in the amount of Argentine and Chilean wine I bought, and occasional visits to northern California only served to reinforce my opinion that the wines there are insanely overpriced and that the average $8 Chilean cabernet will easily beat the average $24 Napa cabernet.
Evidently, I was not alone in ignoring France: the French share of the American market for imported wines fell from 26% in 1994 to 14% in 2004, according to Steinberger.
But over the past year or so, I've been discovering more and more excellent, cheap French wines. While the New World wines have slowly been creeping up in price, French wines have got much cheaper, to the point at which they're actually now better value than many of their austral competitors. Not long ago I bought a case of Les Grès de la Baronne 2001, a Vin de Pays de Hauterives, whatever that might be. I can't recall exactly what I paid for it, but I know it was less than $50. Yes, for the case. And it's delicious. I have no idea where it comes from (except for that it's in France somewhere), or what grape varieties might be in it. All I know is that it's a table wine which is probably ever so slightly past its prime, and if I didn't pay $4 a bottle for it then it would probably end up with 100 million liters of other French wine, being converted to ethanol.
Basically, there's an enormous sale on, with wines being sold below cost, and we consumers are the beneficiaries. So next time you're in your local wine merchant's, take another look at the France section, and try something new and different. You'll probably be shocked at how much bang you get for your buck.
Posted by Felix at 22:29 EST | Comments (0)
Fashion models in the Senate
I can't make head nor tail of the Senate immigration bill. It's incredibly long, incredibly complicated, and full of references to other bills, making it to all intents and purposes incomprehensible. So I have no idea what I think of it.
But in among the amendments and additions, it's good to see that someone in the Senate was keeping their priorities straight. Of all the occupations one might expect to see singled out for special attention, I have to say I wouldn't have expected fashion model to be high up the list. But here it is:
SEC. 402. NONIMMIGRANT TEMPORARY WORKER.(a) Temporary Worker Category- Section 101(a)(15)(H) (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)) is amended to read as follows:
`(H) an alien--
`(i)(b) subject to section 212(j)(2)--
`(aa) who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services (other than services described in clause (ii)(a) or subparagraph (O) or (P)) in a specialty occupation described in section 214(i)(1) or as a fashion model;
`(bb) who meets the requirements for the occupation specified in section 214(i)(2) or, in the case of a fashion model, is of distinguished merit and ability;
Unfortunately, since I'm not familiar with Section 101(a)(15)(H) (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)), I don't know what fashion models might now be able to do that they weren't able to do in the past. But I do look forward to reading the jurisprudence on the subject of whether a fashion model "is of distinguished merit and ability".
Posted by Felix at 23:01 EST | Comments (2)
Hedge funds, alpha, and beta
Hedge fund managers and investors in hedge funds are generally very smart and very sophisticated. They like to talk a lot about risk-adjusted returns, and especially about "alpha" and "beta" – central components of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. And yet, after all that highfalutin' talk, the way that hedge fund managers are paid is very unsophisticated indeed. There's no risk adjustment there: just a percentage of the funds under management, and a percentage of the raw profits.
It's easy, if you're a hedge fund, to bump up returns a lot using simple leverage. Let's say I think the S&P is going up, and I want to invest $1,000 so that it returns more than the S&P. All I have to do is borrow $1,000 from the bank, add it to the $1,000 that I have in cash, and invest $2,000 in an S&P 500 index fund. At the end of the year, let's say the index has gone up 10%, so my $2,000 has become $2,200. I pay off my bank loan – let's say I borrowed at 4%, so that's $1,040 – and have $1,160 left: a 16% return on my original $1,000.
Now let's say that rather than going through that operation myself, I hired a hedge fund manager to do it for me. I'd pay him 2% of the $1,000 – that's $20 – and another 20% of the $160 profits – that's $32. So the total fees would be $52, leaving me with $1,108. If I'd invested in the S&P 500 directly, I'd only have $1,100, so even after fees, I can tell all my friends that my hedge fund manager has beat the market.
Of course, there's no reason why my hedge fund manager should stop at borrowing just one dollar for every dollar he invests. Let's say he takes my $1,000, borrows $4,000, and invests $5,000 in index funds. At the end of the year, he's made $500 in profits, and has paid $160 in interest, leaving him with a $340 or 34% return. His investors pay fees of $20 plus $68 for every $1,000 they invest, leaving them with total profits of $340 – $88 = $252, or more than 25%. Whee!
In the real world, hedge funds, and their investors, are much more sophisticated than that. They know the difference between smart investing and leveraged investing, and they measure that difference using their beloved alpha and beta. Alpha is an attempt to measure how smart an investor is: to work out what his returns are after taking into account the riskiness of his investment portfolio. Beta is simply the riskiness of the portfolio.
In my examples, the S&P 500 has a beta of 1, or 100%; the first hedge fund manager has a beta of 2, or 200%; and the second hedge fund manager has a beta of 5, or 500%. The riskier and more volatile the assets you're investing in, the higher their beta. And, of course, as you increase your leverage, you increase your beta proportionately. What hedge fund managers are looking for is alpha, which is return over and above whatever the beta of their portfolio might be. So if the beta of your portfolio is one, and you manage to do better than the S&P 500, then you're a smart investor with positive alpha. In my cases above, the hedge fund managers might have managed to beat the S&P 500, but they did so by increasing their beta and decreasing their alpha. In fact, their alpha in both cases is negative.
Hedge funds, then, are always on the lookout for ways to increase their alpha. One way to do that is to get high returns; another way to do that is to decrease your beta. If one manager manages to get a 16% return with a beta of 110%, and other manager gets that 16% return with a beta of 85%, then the second manager has a much higher alpha, or risk-adjusted return, and is likely to be much more popular with investors.
At the end of the year, however, the fees that those two hedge fund managers charge to their investors will be identical. Hedge fund managers might spend their lives chasing alpha, but that's not what their pay is tied to. Their pay is simply tied to total return.
This, I think, is the point that Jenny Anderson was trying to make in her column on Friday. Jenny is an excellent reporter, as I said on Tuesday. She covers the hedge fund beat for the New York Times, she has great sources, and she's generally dead-on in knowing who's bullshitting her and who isn't. The broad thrust of her column is quite right. But the substance of it is way off base: in order to make a perfectly valid point, she uses all manner of erroneous arguments.
Firstly, she doesn't seem to really understand alpha and beta: a problem, when the headline on the column is "Hey, You Have a Problem Paying Alpha Fees and Getting Beta Returns?". Here's the meat of her argument:
Where are the "alpha" generators, those that are supposed to create performance above the market? (Market returns are called beta.) From May 1 through May 19, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index dropped 2.9 percent. ... The GLG European Long-Short fund fell 5.13 percent through May 19, posting a 13.70 percent gain for the year. ...
To be fair, one month of data is not an indication of how closely a fund is tied to a particular market or how that fund will perform for the year. Any number of things can happen to turn around the performance. But the question that many investors should be asking is: Am I getting alpha or beta? And if the answer is beta, why the high fees?
Simply put, hedge funds that claim they are not correlated to the markets should not be correlated to the market. In bull markets, investors do not question correlation.
There is a lot of very confused logic here. Firstly, alpha is not the same as "performance above the market," as we've seen: you can have performance well above the market, but if your beta is high enough then your alpha can still be negative. And beta is not a measure of "market returns": it's a measure of risk, or volatility. Anderson seems to be assuming here that all hedge funds have a beta of one, before rephrasing her assumption, mildly garbling it in the process, and then giving it to us as a definition of beta.
Anderson then spends a lot of space (I snipped out most of this) running down a list of hedge funds and looking at how they performed over the period May 1 to May 19. What on earth is this supposed to prove? For starters, we have no idea of these hedge funds are representative of hedge funds as a whole, or if Anderson picked them precisely because they fell significantly in that short time. But in any case, what point, exactly, is she trying to make when she says that the GLG European Long-Short fund is down 5.13% in May so far but up 13.7% over 2006 as a whole? And why is she comparing a European fund to the performance of the S&P 500?
Looking at various hedge funds' performance over a period of three weeks will tell you absolutely nothing: most smart investors won't even look at a fund manager until he can demonstrate his performance over three years at the minimum. Hedge funds are difficult to get in to and difficult to get out of: the people who invest in them do so for the medium to long term. Looking at short-term performance is something that market analysts do in order to get a feel for where hedge fund money might be positioned. It is a very silly way of judging hedge fund managers. Anderson admits as much with her "to be fair" sentence, but if she really believed it, she wouldn't have spent the previous two paragraphs detailing a series of short-term returns.
Anderson is quite right that investors should be asking whether they're getting alpha or beta: whether their funds' returns are positive, on a risk-adjusted basis, or whether they're simply following the market as a whole. But this isn't news to any investor, or to any hedge fund. While fees might be tied to total return rather than alpha, investors tend to pull their money out of any fund whose beta is higher than the return that they're getting. When hedge funds report their performance to their investors, they tend to emphasize risk-adjusted returns over nominal returns for precisely that reason.
And none of this has anything to do with correlation. Yes, Anderson is trivially correct that "hedge funds that claim they are not correlated to the markets should not be correlated to the market". But neither alpha nor beta is related to market correlation. In fact, Anderson implies that "hedge funds that claim they are not correlated to the markets" are exactly the same as "the 'alpha' generators, those that are supposed to create performance above the market". But of course that's impossible: if you're not correlated to the market, you can't promise above-market returns.
I once wrote a profile of a large, conservative hedge fund called Elliott Associates, which is very much one of those funds which claims that it is not correlated to the market. The idea is to get consistent good-but-not-spectacular returns, no matter whether the stock market is going up or down or sideways, and to do so with a lower risk than the S&P 500 to boot. Elliott definitely promises alpha, but it never promises to beat the market. If Elliott returns 20% with low beta in a year when the S&P 500 returns 30% with high beta, then Elliott's managers will be happy. Over the long term, Elliott has outperformed the S&P 500, but not by an enormous amount: the really impressive numbers emerge when you look at its risk-adjusted returns, since it managed to outperform the market while taking on substantially less risk than someone who simply invested in the market as a whole.
Anderson, on the other hand, concentrates in her column on "emerging-market, commodity, small- and mid-cap and currency funds": hedge funds which are specifically designed to give investors exposure to emerging markets, commodities, etc. If I invested in Elliott Associates and it underperformed the S&P 500 in a good year for US equities, I wouldn't be upset, since no one invests in Elliott Associates in order to get exposure to US equities. On the other hand, if I invested in an emerging-market fund and it did badly in a year which was good for emerging markets, I would be upset: investors in such funds want correlation with those asset classes.
When hedge fund managers or investors finish reading Anderson's column, then, they're likely to have less respect for Anderson personally, and for the New York Times business section generally, than they did at the beginning. And that's bad for both franchises. The Times wants desperately to be taken seriously in the financial world, and "added-value" columns like Anderson's are a large part of that effort. But it's worth noting that the Wall Street Journal, the gold standard of daily financial journalism, has precious little in the way of journalist-written commentary. Opinion is cheap; news is expensive. If the Times continues to emphasize the former in its own pages while outsourcing the latter on its website, it will never join the likes of the Journal or Bloomberg News as a respected source of financial information.
Posted by Felix at 1:09 EST | Comments (7)
New Yorker media kit
Jason Kottke's found the new New Yorker media kit, and it certainly helps explain why I couldn't find a copy of the magazine in St Louis. Newsstand circulation is just 46,808, compared to over 1 million subscribers. Looking over the calendar it seems there's no money issue this year, which is disappointing: that's normally one of their best. Although there are double issues in July and August which have no theme allocated as yet. Interestingly September has an education issue: I don't recall seeing that one before.
Posted by Felix at 23:09 EST | Comments (0)
The sentence with five full stops
We are editors, yes, but we must be writers as well. And sometimes a stylebook ruling or a factual correction conflicts with the goal of presenting prose that sounds as if maybe, just maybe, it was written by a human rather than a machine.
Bill Walsh, a copyeditor by profession, is absolutely right on this point. So what does he do when faced with this sentence? Look at the sentence, see if you can do better, and then I'll tell you what Walsh's solution is.
The group, which backed the Supreme Court confirmations of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., objected to the commentary.
Have you managed to come up with something less convoluted, easier to read, and possibly written by a human? Something like this, perhaps?
The group, which backed the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, objected to the commentary.
Well, here's what Walsh came up with:
Oh, wait. That sentence was what Walsh came up with. It was his solution to the problem of saying "Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts" when in fact Roberts is not the chief justice of the Supreme Court, but rather the Chief Justice of the United States.
Walsh's sentence is symptomatic of one of my biggest problems with American broadsheet journalism: its pedantry and rules-based verbosity. The formal titles of Roberts and Alito were not relevant to the sentence; they just got in the way. But someone at the Washington Post has decreed that the formal titles of both men must always be used, and so the sentence grows. Certainly there is no sensible reason why we need these men's middle initials, or need to be told that they share the same names as their respective fathers. The reason for writing "Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr." can't possibly be to differentiate him from some other Chief Justice called John Roberts, so why do it?
As a wise man once wrote on the subject of middle initials,
To write "the Kenneth W. Starr investigation of the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal" is akin to writing "Las Vegas, Nev.-style gambling" or "the [Muhammad] Ali [formerly Cassius Clay] shuffle."
Ah yes, that man was Bill Walsh. Physician, heal thyself!
One sacred cow that Walsh hasn't dared to attack, to my knowledge, is the American insistence on placing what they call periods and we Brits call full stops in the middle of sentences. I was taught by some very smart English teachers, who explained that the full stop is the most powerful piece of punctuation: it ends a thought, a sentence, an idea. Which is one of the reasons why one-word sentences can be so effective. We're all taught from a very early age that when you're reading and you come to a full stop, you come to a full stop.
And yet Walsh manages to have no fewer than five full stops in the course of his one model sentence. What purpose is served by writing "John G. Roberts rather than John G Roberts"? (Obviously John Roberts is better still.) Why make a sentence harder to read by punctuating middle initials and those annoying "Jr." addenda?
To my knowledge, no other English-speaking country follows these crazy self-imposed rules -- which is a reason why newspapers in England or Australia or South Africa are generally easier to read. Newspapers exist to serve their readers, and newspaper readers are ill served by all this pedantry. Bill Walsh, far from perpetuating it, should be trying to drag the Washington Post's language into the 21st Century.
Posted by Felix at 9:46 EST | Comments (0)
Bloomberg on immigration
One of the more interesting aspects of the immigration debate is the difference between New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles, full of immigrants, is split between the Latinos and their supporters, on the one hand, and those who would kick them all out if they could, on the other.
In New York, by contrast, virtually everybody is pro-immigrant. And it's not because there are fewer immigrants here: Michael Bloomberg notes today that New York City has 3 million immigrants, of whom 500,000 are illegal. He adds:
Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders or overstaying their visas, our economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation.
Bloomberg makes some sensible points, which probably means he will be ignored in this overheated debate. Just don't ask me what I was doing reading the WSJ editorial page.
Posted by Felix at 22:30 EST | Comments (7)
What's that per pixel?
When you're selling a $3.4 million townhouse in the East Village, you can rest assured your broker will show your place at its very best. Or, you know, not.
Posted by Felix at 22:18 EST | Comments (4)
Where's the beef?
I have something of a morning routine: I get myself a cup of coffee and read the A section of the New York Times while waking up.
The institutional verbosity of the Times makes my routine more difficult. But most of the time the NYT manages to say what the news is, at least.
Not today. Here are the headlines on the paper's lead story:
BIG BOARD BIDS FOR EXCHANGES ACROSS EUROPE
A $10.2 BILLION OFFERING
Deal Would Give N.Y.S.E. a Foothold in 5 Capitals – Many Obstacles
It's a bit verbose, and if you think about it too long it doesn't make a lot of sense: a takeover bid isn't really an "offering", and the deal would give the NYSE more than just a "foothold" in those capitals. But the biggest error is one of omission. We know who the bidder is: the NYSE. We know how much they're bidding: $10.2 billion. But we have no idea who the target is.
Such information always appears in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence; in this case, they're the same.
The New York Stock Exchange took a big step yesterday toward the creation of a global marketplace by offering to acquire the operator of five European stock and futures exchanges for $10.2 billion in cash and shares.
So now we know it's stock and futures exchanges, and we know the NYSE wants to pay in cash and shares. But we still don't know who they're bidding for. Maybe in the next paragraph? No, that's reserved for a quote from the NYSE's CEO. Maybe the paragraph after that? No, at that point we descend into classic NYT portentiousness:
Finance and investment have been global phenomena for decades: Asian central banks are among the biggest buyers of United States Treasury obligations, big American commercial banks are joining their London counterparts in wooing Middle East investors, and hedge funds based in Connecticut buy and sell in markets from Iceland to Indonesia.
What??? This isn't news, it's filler: what's known in England as "freelancitis" when writers are paid by the word or the inch. And while I normally roll my eyes at such stuff, it simply Does. Not. Belong. in this story above the central and crucial information of who the NYSE is bidding for.
The next paragraph doesn't help us out on that front either: instead, it's devoted to telling us that when the bid was made yesterday, "share prices around the world were falling, seemingly in concert, beginning in Asia and continuing in Europe, before recovering somewhat in New York". That's not even market reaction to the proposed deal, it's just intraday noise with no connection to the story at all.
Finally, in the fifth paragraph, 200 words into the story, we find that the target of the deal is Euronext.
I'm sorry to say that the perpetrator of this nonsense is my friend Jenny Anderson, a very good journalist who honed her newspapering skills at the New York Post. Which is the kind of newspaper which would never, ever wait 200 words to reveal the name of a $10 billion company being bid on. Clearly, however, the culture of the Times can turn anybody.
Later on in the section, there's an interesting story about the Fulton Street transit hub. In the wake of the news that the neigbouring World Trade Center memorial is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget, we're now told that something similar is going on with the plan to simplify the mess that is the Fulton Street subway station. Only this time, far from burying a key piece of information, the Times simply doesn't bother to supply us with the architect's name at all. (It's Nicholas Grimshaw, an excellent UK architect who's not well known on these shores.) They'd never do that to Michael Arad.
The NYT is examining its front-page reporting with much laboriousness these days. But for the time being, it would seem, that effort has achieved nothing.
Posted by Felix at 8:40 EST | Comments (1)
The politics of global warming
When I reviewed An Inconvenient Truth last month, I complained that "it will be far too easy for Republicans to dismiss this film as liberal propaganda." Little did I know. MoveOn has now got into the act, at a webpage whose address is http://political.moveon.org/seethetruth/ – that "political" in the URL more or less gives the game away.
Climate change is a political issue, but the key task for those who would push it as such is to prevent it from becoming a party political issue. Science does not have a left-wing bias, and even though it's relatively rare for a politician like Al Gore to have a scientific background, it's far from unheard-of and it's not at all confined to lefties. (Margaret Thatcher, remember, read Chemistry at Oxford.)
Yet in the US, it would seem, things are very different, largely as a result of the influence and importance of the religious right in politics. Since these people know the Truth, and know where to find it, it follows that anything which contradicts that Truth is wrong. Most glaringly, of course, this applies to evolution: since the Bible is right, Science must be wrong. And since scientists are unanimous that evolution is right, it therefore follows that it is entirely possible for the entire scientific community to be wrong about something. And once people have doubt about the ability of scientists to get something like evolution right, then pretty much anything can be questioned: that HIV causes Aids, that people can be born homosexual, that emissions of greenhouse gases cause climate change.
Note that you don't even need to be a creationist in order for the creationists' propaganda to do its work in this respect. All you need to do is be sympathetic enough to the creationists as to believe that there's actually a meaningful debate: that even if the scientists are right, they might have been wrong. Once the possibility that basic science is wrong has been raised, it becomes vastly more difficult to persuade anybody that science can be trusted on anything.
Last night, I had a mildly exasperating conversation with a guy called Sam, who had read Michael Crichton's anti-environmentlist novel State of Fear. "I'm a lefty, I took a course on the environment in journalism school, and even I found the book compelling," he said. Crichton, of course, is the novelist and Bush buddy who has carved something of a second career out of asserting that global warming, insofar as it exists, is not much of a problem and is not anthropogenic. One of the arguments that Sam found most compelling was when he said that since carbon dioxide accounts for much less than 1% of the atmosphere, it really can't have much of an effect.
Sam even had a novel explanation for how it is that the entire scientific community could be wrong, while a few brave voices (like, er, Bush and Crichton) could be right. I don't think that he was particularly religious; in any case, it was clear that a call to Biblical authority would hardly convince me. So instead he pulled out his trump card: "You should really read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," he said. "It proves that all scientists can be wrong."
I could almost hear Thomas Kuhn rolling in his grave.
But on a much more basic level, there was a general theme running through my conversation with Sam: the idea that there are things that science can't explain. He brought up the origin of the universe, the origin of the planet, the origin of life. He said that science couldn't explain how light can be both a wave and a particle at the same time; and he was most insistent on the teleological questions: why have we evolved? For Sam, life had to have some kind of meaning, beyond the personal or interpersonal. Science couldn't provide that meaning, ergo there were shortcomings to science, and non-scientists such as he could feel pretty confident dismissing an entire scientific discipline on the basis of reading a science-fiction thriller.
One of the problems with any attempt to explain science to a non-scientific audience is that the audience has to trust its interlocutor to be fair in its marshalling of the facts and the scientific literature. Andy Revkin can say, for example, "that humans are clearly warming the earth and this will have profound consequences later in the century" – but if you don't trust Revkin to accurately summarise what we know and what we don't know, then his years of reporting on the subject will never convince you.
There have been hundreds of attempts to summarise the climate change facts; Al Gore's film is only the latest. More documentaries will be made; more books will be written; more magazine articles will appear – although they will have to be very good indeed to be better than The Climate of Man, the series for which Elizabeth Kolbert and the New Yorker won a well-deserved Ellie award this year. And all of them will sit on top of the scientific literature. If there's a deep-seated mistrust of the whole praxis of science, then none of these things is likely to grab the popular imagination, and politicians will continue to be able to ignore global climate change with impunity.
I don't know how to solve this problem. On an individual level, it can be done, through pointing people to just some tiny bit of the primary literature. Anybody who sees for themselves the rigour of pretty much any scientific paper will take much less convincing that when the whole body of scientific literature comes to exactly the same conclusion, then that conclusion must actually be true.
But there will always be skeptics with unfalsifiable skeptical positions. The great thing about the "intelligent design" arguments against evolution, or the Crichtonist arguments against anthropogenic climate change, is that they feel no need to posit scientific (ie, falsifiable) theories of their own. If one part of one scientific model turns out to be wrong, they use that not as evidence that scientists are doing their job, but rather as evidence that "every single global climate model you ever heard of is completely useless and inaccurate". The scientists are placed in an impossible position, where any corroborating evidence is ignored and any real or imagined problems with the models are magnified to enormous proportions.
I feel that the only way that scientists are going to be able to sway public opinion is going to be when the religious right stops waging its current war on science. If religious leaders treated science with respect, then Americans might stop looking for reasons to mistrust scientists at every available opportunity. Unfortunately, the attacks on scientific consensus seem to be getting bolder and stronger – which means that Americans have more reason than ever to doubt the likes of Al Gore and his science-based arguments.
Posted by Felix at 17:34 EST | Comments (0)
Todd Gibson on money and art
The interplay of art's domain and money's is very complex. The relationship of money to any individual work of art, however, is very simple. There is none. In practice, the culture usually sets a minimum value on works of art, which is really just an ante. When I was an art dealer, any biggish work of art was worth five hundred dollars. Any littlish work of art was worth two hundred. Today, a biggish work is worth a thousand dollars and a littlish work is worth three hundred. Everything you pay over that is the consequence of previous external investments taken at risk.
So you pay a grand for a painting from an unknown artist's studio. If you wait until that artist has a dealer, you are going to pay more. If you wait until she has good reviews, you are going to pay more still. It you wait until Paul Schimmel down at MOCA notices her work, you are going to pay even more than that, and if you wait until everybody wants one, of course, you are going to pay a whole hell of a lot more, since as demand approaches "one" and supply approaches "zero," price approaches infinity. But you are not paying for art. You are paying for assurance, for social confirmation of your investment, and the consequent mitigation of risk. You are paying to be sure, and assurance (or insurance, if you will) is very expensive, because risk is everything, for everybody, in the domain of art.
–Dave Hickey, Dealing, 1997
OK, so now I've buggered myself royally. You can't start a blog entry with a long quote from Dave Hickey and then expect to write anything which doesn't shrivel up in comparison. But I felt impelled to get something really good down here on the subject of art and money, in response to Todd Gibson's latest on the subject.
Gibson starts by setting up a classic straw man, in the form of an inchoate "many managing art investments today". These "many," it would seem, claim that art "is an alternate investment class that keeps pace with or outperforms the market."
First off, there aren't many people managing art investments today: certainly not in the portfolio-manager type way that Gibson would have you believe they are. Every so often some bright spark tries to set up an art investment fund, and nine times out of ten it fizzles out before it is even officially launched. So far, no one has set up a fund which has really caught the imagination of investors and stayed around for long enough to demonstrate clear returns on investment.
As a result, the handful of people who are trying to set up a business by managing art investments certainly do not make the kind of claims that Gibson says they make. Yes, it's an alternate investment class. But no, they're not selling its outperformance compared to "the market", whatever that might be. (The US stock market, I presume, although I'm not sure.)
Rather, there's a very good reason that people are interested in alternative investments, and it has nothing to do with outperformance: it's called diversification. If you had your money in a portfolio of high-flying stocks in 2000, you would have seen your net worth plunge over the next couple of years. If you'd diversified into high-flying contemporary artists as well, then the ability of your art to hold its value in the face of plunging equity valuations would have saved you some of that pain. Contrariwise, technology stocks proved a very good investment during the art-market slump of the late 1980s. The fact that the two asset classes are barely correlated is enormously valuable to certain investors, and essentially helps explain the whole attraction of "alternative investments".
And yet, as I say, art funds have essentially gotten nowhere over the past few years, even as the art market has gone through one of the biggest booms in its history. Why is that? Obviously, because no one sees the point in investing in art which they can't personally enjoy. There's a lot of talk in art-investment circles about art's "negative carry": the fact that far from paying interest or dividends, art actually costs money to own – mainly the costs of storage and insurance. The best-case scenario, if you buy something really good, is that you can put the artwork on long-term loan to a museum which will shoulder those costs for you. Art will never give you the kind of returns you can get from reinvesting dividends – returns which are crucial to the evaluation of any stock-market investment. Instead, art's dividends (as opposed to its capital gains) are entirely non-financial. You buy a work of art because you love it, and because of the personal value that you derive from owning it and seeing it on a daily basis. Buying a share in an art fund is like buying a value stock without a dividend.
But this is not to say that it makes no sense to invest in art. Certainly, I'd never recommed doing so: quite the opposite. But for someone with enough investments, or a high enough income, that day-to-day expenses are no longer much of an issue, there is wonderful value to be gotten from art which one loves. And if a wealthy investor spends a lot of money buying or "collecting" art, then his financial advisor would be remiss not to take that art into account when setting out his investment strategy. After all, the collector now has a large natural diversification out of traditional investments, so it might well make sense not to put more money into other high-risk, high-diversification strategies.
And Todd Gibson's complaints ring rather hollow. He chastises the Mei-Moses art index, for instance, on the grounds that "it only looks at the winners," conveniently ignoring the fact that the same thing is true of pretty much any equity index you care to mention, and certainly of the DJIA and the S&P 500 indices that he mentions in his previous post.
And he also has a most peculiar riff on the perceived success of Dorothy Miller qua art investor, despite conceding early on that "she wasn’t, I’m sure, collecting as an investment." Miller bought widely and bought well, and scored enough home runs (Gibson cites Johns, Kline, Calder) that I'm sure she made a handsome (if posthumous) financial return on her investment – a return which, since she didn't sell this art in her lifetime, she obviously had little interest in. Gibson zeroes in, however, on one of her less successful investments, a painting which sold at Christie's in 1993 for just over $1,000. What does he conclude from this?
Assuming that Miller bought the piece in the mid-1950s for around $125, the painting as an investment barely kept pace with inflation and under-performed the stock market. Even MoMA curator Dorothy Miller, with her great eye and access to work by artists whose reputation she had a hand in making, was not able to consistently pick investment quality art for her personal collection.
As Tyler Green might say, Huh?
Firstly, Miller wasn't trying to "pick investment quality art". Secondly, notwithstanding that fact, Miller undoubtedly put together an investment quality portfolio. And most importantly, the fact that Miller bought some art which didn't skyrocket in value is a necessary consequence of the fact that she bought a lot of art which did: see that Hickey quote, above. Even Gibson says that a lucky collector with a great eye will see big returns "one or two times out of ten". This painting at Christie's is a counterexample of what, exactly? It's like saying that Warren Buffett can't be a great investor because some of his investment picks went down.
And the really crazy thing is that Gibson concedes that Miller's "bad" pick actually increased in value in real terms. Think of all the times you buy a thing you love – something you get value just out of owning. It might be a book, or a car, or a kitchen appliance,or a diamond ring, or a watch, or a computer, or a handbag, or a pair of shoes, or a cellphone, or anything, really. The only thing these things have in common is that none of them increase in value. Even in nominal terms, let alone real terms. And yet when Dorothy Miller bought something she loved and it appreciated eightfold in value, Gibson dismisses the purchase as under-performing the stock market. The stock market! As though Miller might have been better advised to hang brokerage statements on her wall instead of art!
Todd Gibson has now written two posts on "why art isn't a great long term investment". They concluded like this:
Well managed hedge funds will return 15-20% CAGR over a lengthy period. While the return on this little Joan Mitchell painting has been about as good (on a pure percentage basis) as could possibly be, when time is taken into consideration by looking at CAGR the return isn’t amazing. It did beat the market by a wide margin, but a smart asset manager can do significantly better.
About the best you can do is claim that art is a venture capital-type investment. A few pieces, if you know how to pick them, may provide outsized returns. Many more may mirror the market. The majority, though, will barely keep pace with inflation—if even that.
The first post seems to say that even if your art manages to beat "the market" by a wide margin, it still isn't a great long term investment, since there are hedge funds out there which have done even better than that. The second seems to say that if the majority of your pieces keep pace with inflation, a bunch of them mirror "the market", and a few provide outsized returns, then that's a suboptimal outcome.
Most people would be overjoyed to "beat the market" or to have made investments which "provide outsized returns" – not Gibson. He is only happy, it would seem, if all of his investments beat the market, and if he can meet or beat the returns of the world's best hedge fund managers – just by investing in art.
All I can say is I'm very glad that I'm not Todd Gibson's asset manager.
Posted by Felix at 0:23 EST | Comments (9)
LCB Brasserie Rachou
I should be careful what I wish for, I guess: when I turned up unannounced on Friday night and asked for a table for four at Chubo, we were told that the restaurant was booked solid. So instead we hopped in a cab and went uptown, to another great yet underappreciated NYC restaurant, LCB Brasserie Rachou.
When my friend Simon was looking for a nice romantic place to celebrate his wife's 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago, I thought of LCB Brasserie; he went, and came away raving about it. Maybe slightly more expensive than a typical upscale French bistro, he said, but with vastly better food and service.
Frank Bruni gave it two stars back in 2004, and I'd recommend that he return, since it's certainly better now than it was then. Cheaper, too: the choucroute he complains about paying $30 for is now $24. The main courses are just as wonderful as the ones Bruni had and raved about, but the desserts, which Bruni was unsure about, are now divine – especially the soufflé. The words "the best dessert I've ever had" were uttered. And I'm not going to forget my pike quenelles any time soon – they were just gorgeous. Better, I have to say, than the ones I had at La Caravelle just before it closed.
LCB Brasserie, just like its stuffier predecessor La Côte Basque, specialises in traditional French cuisine. So while it's always fun to be adventurous in a restaurant, I'd highly advise the opposite here: the more old-fashioned the dish, the better it's likely to be. It doesn't need to be posh – the choucroute was amazing – but it certainly can be: I can't imagine going anywhere else for Dover sole meurniere.
And while the wine list is predictably heavy on the Bordeaux, it's also reasonably imaginative and surprisingly low-priced: at the high end, bottles can go for hundreds of dollars less than they would cost at, say, Veritas, while at the low end there's a lot of interesting stuff in the $30 to $70 range, including some fantastic Bordeaux. We had a stunning New Zealand pinot noir which, I was gratified to see, came with a screw top: the more that grand restaurants serve great wine from screw-top bottles, the less of a stigma will be attached to them, and the sooner we can do away with anachronistic and unreliable corks for the vast majority of our wine.
LCB Brasserie is not as popular as it deserves to be, which is a shame. Certainly, anybody who loved La Côte Basque or who never got around to going there or who was put off by its prices or its dress code should head to its successor forthwith. The food is just as good, and the interior, the biggest change in the restaurant, is in many ways improved. Plus, you don't need to wear a tie. If there were any justice in this world, a large chunk of the lunch crowd at Michael's, on the same block, would move a few doors down the street and start getting much better food at much lower prices. But Jean-Jacques Rachou will never emphasize healthy, low-calorie dishes, even if his salads are excellent. Thank God.
Posted by Felix at 17:18 EST | Comments (1)
NYT still doesn't get the web
If the New York Times won't, maybe Google will.
I'm talking about pointing to original research: something I'm very interested in with my Report Report Report. (There have been quite a few articles I've wanted to write an RRR on, but haven't been able to get the original paper.)
This week, the NYT's science editor, Laura Chang, is answering questions from readers. I asked her why the NYT's web stories couldn't provide links to original research, or why the NYT couldn't even host copies of the research itself if the authors were amenable, which they often would be. She didn't answer my question directly, but she answered a very similar one:
I, like several readers who asked similar questions, also wish our articles could include specific links to sources. We're working on it, but it's a more difficult goal than we imagined. It can be a tedious job to insert such references into articles, raising a basic question of best use of our reporters' time.
This is a terrible answer. I admit that I don't know how easy or difficult it is to insert a hyperlink in a NYT news story, but I suspect it's not quite as hard as Chang makes out. But even if it is "a tedious job", journalists should do it anyway.
The job of a journalist on the New York Times or at any newspaper is to serve the paper's readers. Most of the time, that means doing classically journalistic things like interviewing sources and crafting clear and compelling stories. And some of the time it means doing things which can be tedious: waiting outside a courthouse for a defendent to emerge, for instance, or making sure that hyperlinks go into stories.
The New York Times claims that nytimes.com is not simply the paper version of the newspaper put up on the internet: it's a web-based news source unto itself. And certainly nytimes.com gets orders of magnitude more readers than the paper version does. So it's frankly stupid for journalists to do all manner of tedious things for a paper story but to draw the line at creating a hyperlink.
The fact is that if you're writing about a scientific report, and the report is available online, you should link to it. Always.
But if the New York Times won't maybe Google will: we now have Google Scholar, which looks wonderful. I can't wait to test it out for my next Report Report Report.
Posted by Felix at 23:19 EST | Comments (1)
Lies, damn lies, and Alex Tabarrok
Alex Tabarrok today (in an article on which comments are closed):
Since Galbraith wrote, for example, the number of privately owned communities has exploded. Today some 55 million Americans live in a private community, many of which provide their own roads, garbage pickup, and aesthetic regulations.
No link, of course – but does that number seem as improbably high to you as it did to me? A bit of googling didn't take me to the source, but I did find this:
By 2005, about 55 million people lived within a homeowners association, a condominium, or a cooperative.
In other words, anybody who lives in an apartment lives, by Alex Tabarrok's definition, in a "private community". Which might be technically true, but it's certainly not the impression he'd like to give.
Posted by Felix at 22:19 EST | Comments (6)
NYTblog RSS update
Pogue's Posts now comes with a full RSS feed. DealBook, Asimov, Bruni, however – still broken.
Posted by Felix at 23:59 EST | Comments (1)
The supremacy of paint
Greg Allen looks at the auctions in much the same way I did, only instead of Ryman vs Irwin, he uses Nara vs Smithson. As ever, the real money is in paintings. A handful of trophy sculptors (Koons, Hirst, Cattelan) get the megabucks too, but most of the time, anything which requires special, gallery-style installation is simply not going to fetch $$$. It's gotta be able to go well with the sofa, and Irwin and Smithson are bad at that. By the way, that Mitchell that Todd Gibson liked went for $51,000. Seems cheap, in this company – but I've never been a fan of hers.
Posted by Felix at 23:31 EST | Comments (1)
Art auctions
So this season's contemporary art auctions have come and gone: $143 million at Christie's, $129 million at Sotheby's. Sotheby's wins the Best Quote Award, however:
Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art for Sotheby's worldwide and the evening's auctioneer, called the market "passionate and deep," adding, "People bid according to their wealth, not the market."It's actually an interesting insight: the art market has become a bit like the housing market, where sellers look for price and buyers look for whatever they can afford. If it takes $95 million to buy a Picasso, and they have the money available, then that's what the new breed of buyers will pay.
The contemporary art auctions didn't have anything in that stratospheric league, although they had their fair share of multimillion dollar pieces. For me, however, it wasn't the Warhols and DeKoonings which stood out: everybody knows they're going to go for vast sums of money. Rather, I was very surprised by the seven-figure prices being fetched by (relatively) second-tier artists.
I love Robert Ryman, I have to say: his white monochromes are beautiful, classic works of art. But $9.6 million?! It's worth noting that a classic Robert Irwin circle piece from 1965-67, which is just as beautiful and probably even more important in art-historical terms, went for "just" $441,600 in the afternoon sale at Christie's. It's true that the Ryman can be hung on the wall in an expensive house or apartment, while the Irwin really needs its own installation, but still the 2000% difference in price seems excessive.
In a world where it's still rare to see female artists fetching seven figures, it was gratifying to see an Eva Hesse go for $2.2 million. Cecily Brown just failed to make the mark, fetching $968,000, but she'll undoubtedly reach it soon, if she hasn't already done so privately. But $1 million for a Lisa Yuskavage seems pretty crazy to me, I must say.
The Hesse, interestingly, was sold at Christie's in 1992 for $93,500 -- which works out at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of over 25%. Pretty good investment. The trick, of course, is to sell not only at a large profit, but relatively quickly, too. If you wait more than 50 years, then your CAGR is going to come down to the 10-15% range even if you sell for 400 times the original purchase price. On the other hand, 10-15% isn't at all shabby, especially when you add all the emotional equity in there as well. If you have some post-war art which you aren't particularly fond of, it seems that now could well be the best time ever to sell.
Posted by Felix at 9:19 EST | Comments (2)
Contest answer
So here's the deal. The King James Bible, The Wizard of Oz, and the UN Secretariat building in New York are all magnificent, towering achievements on an artistic level. Can you imagine a "Bible as Literature" class based on the New English Bible? Can you think of a film which has resonated in the general public's imagination more strongly or for longer than The Wizard of Oz? Can you think of a building in New York more perfect than the UN Secretariat?
I'm serious about the UN Secretariat, by the way. When I first arrived in New York, I was magnetically attracted to the gleaming Chrysler Building, of course. And then after working downtown for a while I moved my affections over to the Woolworth Building. But the UN is probably closer to perfect than either of them – and beats, in my view, the Park Avenue icons of the Seagram Building and Lever House.
No, that's not the answer. But ask yourself why the Seagram Building and Lever House are so hugely admired, while the UN Secretariat is often forgotten. It's obvious: the Seagram was built by Mies and Johnson, while Lever House was built by Gordon Bunshaft. The UN Secretariat, by contrast, was built by, um...
So that's what I was driving at. When we think great literature, we think Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Nabokov – authors. When film buffs talk of the greats, they talk of Fellini and Wilder and Godard. Hell, pick up this week's New Yorker, and turn to Anthony Lane's cinema review. Check out the caption on the illustration: "Tom Cruise as special agent Ethan Hunt in J.J. Abrams's movie." Yes, even M:i:III, the ur-blockbuster, the ultimate star-driven film, is attributed to one J.J. Abrams – someone who couldn't even be called a film director before this movie came out, because he'd never directed a film before.
One minor milestone in the intellectual development of a child is when they start moving away from liking certain books and certain music, and start liking certain authors and certain bands. And once you go there, it's almost impossible to go back: everyone seems determined to give almost everything an author. (Which might be one of the reasons why conspiracy theories are so common, and opposition to Darwinism is so widespread.)
I've written before about how such attributions of authorship can be silly, but they're also important, because great works of art can actually get much less attention than they ought to if there isn't an author to glorify.
The three examples in my contest, then, are all works of art which don't have a single author who can take the credit and the glory – and for that reason, I think, they're often overlooked when they would never be if they were "by" someone famous. This is not a question of things being designed by committee, although Miss Representation was closer to the answer than anybody else. But in fact the fact that we want to attribute authorship of these artworks to someone, or something, even if it's only a committee, is telling. An artist, on one popular view, is one of the three necessary elements for a work of art to exist, the other two being an art object and a viewer. I hold up three possible counterexamples.
Posted by Felix at 21:31 EST | Comments (7)
What comes after death?
This is what has become of Lot 61, the club that made Amy Sacco. The rear of the puddle on the floor more or less corresponds to where the wall behind the front bar used to be. It all looks so much smaller empty, in the weird way that real estate always does. The door to the VIP room is still there, on the left. Some things never change: the VIP room is still as attractive as it ever was.
Posted by Felix at 19:42 EST | Comments (0)
Contest
A quick quiz for anybody who's not Todd Gibson. What connects:
- The King James Bible
- The Wizard of Oz (the movie, not the book)
- The UN Secretariat building in New York?
A special treat to whomever is first with the answer I'm thinking of.
Posted by Felix at 21:18 EST | Comments (22)
The pausal comma
Subaru's jump in March sales was, says, the company, because
consumers are responding to our new campaign, 'It's What Makes a Subaru, a Subaru.'
Yes, that comma is there, always – in the print ads, in the television ads, in the press releases. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall at the advertising agency during the discussions over that comma, and whether it should stay or go. Clearly, it's ungrammatical. But it also serves a purpose: it connotes a pause in the subvocalised (or, in the case of the television ads, vocalised) reading of the slogan.
My initial feeling is to disapprove of putting the glorious comma to such mundane use – but then again I'm sure that many poems use it in just such a manner at the end of each line. And since there's no other mark which would serve such a purpose, perhaps we should treat this expansion of the comma's role with equanimity.
Posted by Felix at 21:16 EST | Comments (0)
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