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Another Pickings day without items on DC creeps. First an ode to Elm trees showed up in Sunday’s NY Times. Although the writer was primarily concerned with the trees along Fifth Ave. the accompanying picture was of Pickerhead’s favorite site in New York, the Literary Walk in the Southeast corner of Central Park. That picture, which was too large a file for Pickings, led to a “seasons” of pics of the Walk starting with winter. Then a couple of impressionist paintings are included.
THEY looked, at first glance, like trees in a paint-by-number picture, snow outlining branches in idiot-proof chiaroscuro — a child’s “Winter Scene.” Yet as I stood in a recent wet snowstorm on 110th Street, looking down Fifth Avenue along Central Park, I saw that the elms flanking the sidewalk had an aspect in winter less observable in other seasons, when their branches are cloaked in leaves.
Joined overhead, the topmost limbs rose airily to form a long vaulted corridor stretching to 59th Street and the park’s southern perimeter. It was as if on this west side of Fifth Avenue there existed a chamber, a “tabernacle of the air,” to use a purplish phrase the 19th-century orator and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher favored when describing groves of elm.
High-canopied, in shape either fountain or vase, the American elm is by habit and nature conducive to a grandeur and elegance not lost on Frederick Law Olmsted, Central Park’s designer. Olmsted saw in the American elm, a favorite of his, a tree conducive to creating canopied spaces intended to evoke the tranquil intimacy of ecclesiastical chambers.
So it seemed to me in the snowy stillness of that recent storm. …
… the American elms here remain among the glories “of world urbanism,” as the architect Andrés Duany once said; that the elms on Fifth Avenue stand as unacknowledged reminders of a civic culture in which elms played an important role, since settlers first hauled them from forests to plant as the tree of choice on New England town commons; and that these sentinel giants embody, as Charles Dickens noted, “a kind of compromise between town and country; as if each had met the other half-way, and shaken hands upon it.”
Dickens was writing about New Haven, a city whose 19th-century appearance was in large part defined by the arcades of venerable elms that arched above its streets. …
… “If you think about it, you can spot an elm at midnight,” Mr. Hansel, of the American Elm Institute, noted, referring to the American elm’s distinctive high branching habit, its way of descending in an elegant fountain of limbs. But why postpone pleasure till midnight? Stand on Fifth Avenue between 59th and 110th Streets any time of day or night in this cold season. Look up.
Thomas Wolfe writes for The Atlantic on another Thomas’ abuse of stuff shirts from Europe. This starts slowly. Stick with it. You’ll be rewarded. Wolfe was asked to write on the origin of the “American Idea.”
Since you asked … the American idea was born at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday, December 2, 1803, the moment Thomas Jefferson sprang the so-called pell-mell on the new British ambassador, Anthony Merry, at dinner in the White House. Oh, this was no inadvertent faux pas. This was faux pas aforethought. Jefferson obviously loved the prospect of dumbfounding the great Brit and leaving him speechless, furious, seething, so burned up that smoke would start coming out of his ears. And all that the pell-mell did.
Jefferson had already tenderized the ambassador three days earlier. Merry was the first foreign diplomat to take up residence in Washington. Accompanied by Secretary of State James Madison, he shows up at the White House wearing a hat with a swooping plume, a ceremonial sword, gold braid, shoes with gleaming buckles—in short, the whole aristocratic European ambassadorial getup—for his formal introduction to the president of the United States. He is immediately baffled. Jefferson doesn’t come to greet him in the grand reception hall. Instead, Merry and Madison have to go looking for him … Bango! All at once they bump into the American head of state in some tiny tunnel-like entryway to his study. What with three men and a sword in it all at once, the space is so congested that Merry has to back himself and his sword out of it just to have room to shake hands. When he shakes hands, he’s stunned, appalled: The president of the United States is a very Hogarth of utter slovenliness from his head … to his torso, clad in a casual workaday outfit thrown together with a complete indifference to appearances and a negligence so perfectly gross, it has to have been actually studied … down to his feet, which are stuffed, or mostly stuffed, into a pair of down-at-the-heels slippers, literally slippers and literally worn down at the heels in a way that is sheer Gin Lane. “Utter slovenliness,” “negligence actually studied,” “indifference to appearances,” and “down at the heels” were Merry’s own words in the first of what would become a regular jeremiad of complaints and supplications to Lord Hawkesbury, the foreign secretary, all but coming right out and begging him to break off relations with the United States to protest such pointed insults toward His Majesty’s representative. Merry was ready to bail out … and his wife, a notably not-shy woman née Elizabeth Death (yes), even more so. …
… Jefferson’s pell-mell gave America a mind-set that has never varied. In 1862, 36 years after Jefferson’s death, the government began the process of settling our vast, largely uninhabited western territories. Under the terms of the Homestead Act, they gave it away by inviting people, anybody, to head out into the open country and claim any plot they liked—Gloriously pell-mell! First come, first served! Each plot was 160 acres, and it was yours, free! By the time of the first Oklahoma Land Rush, in 1889, it had become a literal pell-mell—a confused, disorderly, headlong rush. People lined up on the border of the territory and rushed out into all that free real estate at the sound of a starter gun. Europeans regarded this as more lunacy on the part of … these Americans … squandering a stupendous national asset in this childish way on a random mob of nobodies. …
… The Jefferson frame of mind, product of one of the most profound political insights of modern history, has had its challenges in the two centuries since the night Jefferson first sprang the pell-mell upon the old European aristocratic order. But today the conviction that America’s limitless freedom and opportunities are for everyone is stronger than ever. Think of just one example from the late 20th century: Only in America could immigrants of many colors from a foreign country with a foreign language and an alien culture—in this case, Cubans—take political control pell-mell via the voting booth of a great metropolis—Miami—in barely more than one generation.
America remains, as it has been from the very beginning, the freest, most open country in the world, encouraging one and all to compete pell-mell for any great goal that exists and to try every sort of innovation, no matter how far-fetched it may seem, in order to achieve it. It is largely this open invitation to ambition that accounts for America’s military and economic supremacy and absolute dominance in science, medicine, technology, and every other intellectual pursuit that can be measured objectively. And it is absolute.
Yet from our college faculties and “public intellectuals” come the grimmest of warnings. The government has assumed Big Brother powers on the pretext of protecting us from Terror, and the dark night of fascism is descending upon America. As Orwell might have put it, only an idiot or an intellectual could actually believe that.
Der Spiegel examines reports on DNA retrieved from a child who died in Montana 12,000 years ago.
It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn’t have been buried in such a ceremonious manner. The boy was sprinkled with celebratory red dust and given distinctive stone artifacts for his last journey.The characteristic fluting of the stone weapons serve as archeological evidence that the boy, who died some 12,600 years ago, came from the Clovis culture. It was one of the earliest New World groups, disappearing mysteriously a few centuries after the child’s burial in present day Montana. From the summit of a hill towering over the burial site near the YellowstoneRiver, the boy’s Ice Age contemporaries could monitor their hunting grounds for mammoth and bison.
Now a team of scientists led by the Danish geneticist Eske Willerslev has analyzed the boy’s origins and discovered that he descends from a Siberian tribe with roots tracing back to Europe. Some of the boy’s ancestors are likely even to have lived in present-day Germany.
Their findings go even further: More than 80 percent of all native peoples in the Americas — from the Alaska’s Aleuts to the Maya of Yucatan to the Aymaras along the Andes — are descended from Montana boy’s lineage.
Surprising Similarities
Last week, the scientists published the results of sequencing the child’s DNA in the scientific journal Nature. Late last year, the same team published the decoded genome of another early human: A juvenile buried near LakeBaikal in Siberia some 24,000 years ago. Their genomes showed surprising ancestral similarities.
Ever wonder where GDP numbers come from? Tyler Cowen, George Mason econ prof with a bent towards free markets, reviews two books that try to answer that question.
‘May my children grow up in a world where no one knows who the central banker is” is a wise saying. One also can hope for a world where arguments about measuring GDP (gross domestic product, the sum total of the goods and services produced within a nation) or the inflation rate are rare. In good economic times, we tend to take reported economic numbers for granted, but more recently, conspiracy theories have run wild. It is sometimes claimed that “real GDP” or “true inflation” is much higher or lower than what is officially proclaimed. For instance, both Ron Paul and Sen. Tom Coburn have mistakenly charged that inflation is actually running at or above 8 percent a year, which would mean Social Security benefits are not indexed upward enough and real GDP is plummeting, both implausible conclusions.
Fortunately, the popular economics book sector has come to the rescue with two new and useful entries on what our economic statistics mean and why we should (mostly) trust them. This topic is no longer for wonks only.
If you are going to read only one book on GDP, Diane Coyle’s “GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History” should be it. More important, you should read a book on GDP, as many of the political debates of our time revolve around this concept. Can we afford our current path of entitlement spending? Was the Obama fiscal stimulus worth it? When will China overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy?
The answers all depend on GDP. In 140 pages of snappy text, Coyle lays out what GDP numbers measure, what roles they play in economic policymaking and forecasting, and how GDP numbers can sometimes mislead us, albeit not in the way many current critics suggest. …