[PHOTO] "The smiling squid"

Cephalopods are in. I photographed this concrete traffic barrier with an apparently curious and friendly squid spraypainted on it in red in the Annex this past summer.

Seeing this photo again made me wonder about the changing image of cephalopods in world culture. In the 19th century, whales were widely seen as inscrutable monsters, threats to human life, a paradigm defined by Moby-Dick. Over the 20th century, as research into whales and other cetaceans revealed their intelligence and sociable natures, this image changed completely.

Could it be that, as research into cephalopods reveals their remarkable intelligence, their image will change similarly? A Google search for pet cephalopods does reveal a surprising number of hits. Cuttlefish apparently are most popular among the aquarium community, owing to their relatively small size and their fantastic morphing abilities.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• At Crasstalk, LaZiguezon posts pictures of five remarkable abandoned places: a Portuguese-built stadium in Angola left after independence, an island of broken dolls. and more.


• Daniel Drezner notes that a Republican Congressman, Eric Cantor, went on the record as stating that the United States government should do nothing that would upset Israel. That makes Israel singular in that respect.


• Eastern approaches notes that things are getting worse in Lukashenko's Belarus, and that the current round of European Union sanctions may only have the effect of pushing the country into a tighter relationship with Russia.


• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh makes the point that hidden debts and unacknowledged financial liabilities make Spain's position far more awkward and dangerous than commonly assumed.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Paul Mason's new book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere – The New Global Revolutions, which makes the claim that the mass protests and revolutions of the past couple of years are product of the conjunction between disastrous globalization and the technological enablement of large cohorts of educated young people.


• At Registan, Michael Hancock-Parmer makes a brief post commenting on the similarities--phonetic and otherwise--between the Kazakhs and the Cossacks.


• Towleroad notes Germany's defense of its foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, from Belarus' Lukashenko after the man public statement that it was better to be a dictator that to be gay.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin describes the major perspectives of libertarians on the United States' Civil War, covering everything from libertarian supporters of the Union who think the war was the best way of freeing the slaves to full-out supporters of the Confederacy who forget that blacks count as people.

[LINK] "Mrs Beeton, the Voltaire of caffeine"

A Crooked Timber link quotes Victorian cookery writer Isabella Beeton's paradigmatic book Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management on the subject of coffee.

-It is true, says Liebig, that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea and coffee; and daily experience teaches us that, under certain circumstances, they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal functions; but it is an error, certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and it is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them. Science, which accuses us of so much in these respects, will have, in the first place, to ascertain whether it depends on sensual and sinful inclinations merely, that every people of the globe have appropriated some such means of acting on the nervous life, from the shore of the Pacific, where the Indian retires from life for days in order to enjoy the bliss of intoxication with koko, to the Arctic regions, where Kamtschatdales and Koriakes prepare an intoxicating beverage from a poisonous mushroom. We think it, on the contrary, highly probable, not to say certain, that the instinct of man, feeling certain blanks, certain wants of the intensified life of our times, which cannot be satisfied or filled up by mere quantity, has discovered, in these products of vegetable life the true means of giving to his food the desired and necessary quality.

So true, Isabella, so true. (I'm typing on my laptop in Starbucks on Church).

[LINK] "‘Oh, London, You Drama Queen’"

British fiction writer China Miéville's New York Times Magazine essay "‘Oh, London, You Drama Queen’" is subtitled on the New York Times website "China Miéville on Apocalyptic London". It's very true: Miéville's essay does hint at the prospect of things changing radically and totally, whether talking about an over-expensive Olympics that's doing locals in the neighbourhood where it will occur little good, the description of an ever-more-intrusive police, polarization on ethnic lines and religious lines and demographic lines, and the steady pushing-out of Londoners as the high cost of living makes it impossible for London's non-wealthy to live in their city. The essay's conclusion is worth quoting.

London is full of ghosts — ghost walks; a city’s worth of cemeteries; ghost-advertising, scabs of paint on brick. The city invoked something, read a grimoire it shouldn’t have. Thatcher’s face recurs at every turn, not in clouds of sulfur but of exhaust, on buses bearing posters advertising Meryl Streep’s celluloid turn as our erstwhile prime minister. Cabinet reports from the aftermath of other riots across the country, 31 years ago, have been released. A policy was mooted, they suggest — the point is disputed — of “managed decline” of the troublesome areas. Leaving them to rot.

Lionel Morrison considers the past. Few people are so well poised to parse this present, of press scandals, claim and counterclaim of racism and police misbehavior, deprivation, urban uprising. A South African radical, facing the death penalty in 1956 for his struggles against apartheid — in his house there is a photograph of him with one of his co-defendants, Nelson Mandela — Morrison got out, came to London in 1960. In 1987, he became the first black president of the National Union of Journalists. In 2000 he was honored by the British government with what is bleakly, amusingly, still called an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire.

We sit in his home, between English oil portraits that must be two centuries old, and carvings and sculptures from the country of his birth. Is Morrison hopeful? An optimist?

“I’ve been thinking about it myself,” he says gravely, his voice still strongly accented after all these years. “In a sense, I’m optimist. But it hits and completely, constantly kicks at this optimism, you understand?” The “it” is everything.

“It’s like a big angry wolf having it over here. And it’s not prepared to move, and sometimes its legs will go, but slow.” He mimes the animal moving, leaving a little space, a little hole, an exit. “And people will say, ‘Ah, we’ve got it!’ And then chop, it goes again.” His hands come down, the wolf’s grasp closes.

Morrison doesn’t sound despairing. But he does sound tired. “Every time you do something and nothing goes any further, it eats at you,” he says. “It starts this bitterness.” It can break people down. Make them hopeless, or worse. When none of their efforts to improve anything work, some, he warns, will stop fighting. They will say, “Let us just wait for things to — for chaos, really, to take place.”

Is Miéville right to suggest that something's slouching into London, awaiting birth?

[URBAN NOTE] "On upper population limits in Manhattan"

Amy O'Leary's New York Times article "Everybody Inhale:
How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?" isn't just of interest to New Yorkers. Manhattan is arguably the paradigmatic metropolis of the modern world; the question of how many Manhattanites can live, sustainably and in a reasonable degree of comfort, in that territory is universally relevant.

As crowded as the city feels at times, the present-day Manhattan population, 1.6 million, is nowhere near what it once was. In 1910, a staggering 2.3 million people crowded the borough, mostly in tenement buildings. It was a time before zoning, when roughly 90,000 windowless rooms were available for rent, and a recent immigrant might share a few hundred square feet with as many as 10 people. At that time, the Lower East Side was one of the most crowded places on the planet, according to demographers. Even as recently as 1950, the Manhattan of “West Side Story” was denser than today, with a population of two million.

By 1980, with the subsequent flight to suburbia, the population fell to 1.4 million. Then crime dropped, the city strengthened economically, and real estate prices started a steady climb, defying broader downturns in the economy as any dip in the market came to be viewed as a buying opportunity.

But those numbers measure Manhattan at its sleepiest, literally. Census figures count only residents, neglecting, as E. B. White famously wrote, “the New York of the commuter, the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.”

If a whole city can be created and destroyed in a day, Manhattan comes close. During the workday, the population effectively doubles, to 3.9 million, as shown in a new report by the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management of New York University. Day-trippers, hospital patients, tourists, students and, most of all, commuters, drain the suburbs and outer boroughs, filling streets and office space with life. Wednesday, it turns out, is the most populous day of the week, and special events, like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, push the total past five million, offering a glimpse of what an even more crowded Manhattan might feel like.

So if Manhattan’s slow but steady growth continues — and there’s no sign it won’t — how many people can it handle? Answers to this seemingly simple question could fill enough pages to pack a spacious studio apartment, but a quick helicopter tour of future scenarios for Manhattan’s growth shows a tangle of towers and trade-offs.

O'Brien notes that Manhattan's fabric will certainly change radically even with the predicted growth of a quarter-million people by 2030. Low-density areas will be filled, and the skyline is going to rise substantially.

These days, Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, inevitably comes up in conversations about how cities should grow. In his recent book, “Triumph of the City,” he makes an argument — which many consider persuasive — that dense places are uniformly better and more interesting than emptier ones, and that they should be allowed to develop unfettered, even if it means building towers where brownstones once stood.

Affordability is the first reason. If you build up, he says, housing prices will fall and more people will be able to live in their own sliver of Manhattan sky. And that’s a good thing, Mr. Glaeser adds, since the energy of all those newcomers will fuel innovation and entrepreneurship, attracting talent and growth to create a virtuous circle. From energy-efficiency to life expectancy to finding a date or something to do on a Saturday night, Mr. Glaeser argues that denser places have the edge.

He’s all for sacrificing charming stretches of the city for more residential space. He favors preserving noteworthy architecture, but suggests a cap on the number of protected buildings at any one time. If you want to protect a new building, he says, another should come off the list.

“There are certainly individual buildings that I feel sentimental about,” Mr. Glaeser said, recalling the memory of watching snow fall on the brownstones and the old Magyar church across the street from his childhood apartment on 69th Street between First and Second Avenues. “Sure, I would feel a little bit sad if that was torn down, but the upside of having thousands more people getting to enjoy New York would outweigh my personal feelings.”

Mr. Glaeser thinks restricting building height is fundamentally unfair. He has proposed scrapping the city’s permitting process in favor of “impact fees” that developers would pay to cover the infrastructure costs associated with their buildings. So if somebody wanted to build a 50-story building, he or she would simply put up the money required to support its water, sewer, power and so forth.

O'Brien concludes that the ultimate upper limits to population in Manhattan may be very high, so long as the city is willing to support investment in innovative solutions to infrastructure. She invokes the memory of the Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong, a very high-density enclave in that high-density city that was demolished in the 1990s. If Manhattan had the Walled City's population density, it would support 65 million people.

(Crossposted at Demography Matters for obvious reasons.)