Writer and Reader, Bound Together

Tim Parks, in the New York Review of Books blog, writes on the always interesting, sometimes vexed relationship between writers and their readers, one made especially interesting by the blogger and his mostly anonymous readers and commentators:

As with the editing process…there is the question of an understanding between writer and reader about what kind of reading experience is being offered. Readers like to suppose that their favorite writers—journalists, novelists, or poets—are absolutely independent, free from all interference, but the truth is that if an author indulges his own private idiolect or goes on for too long, he can at best expect to divide readers into those who admire him slavishly, whatever he throws at them, and those who set him aside in desperation. At worst he will be left with no readers at all. Is there a relationship between a writer’s respect for these conventions and the content or tone of what he writes, the kind of opinions we can expect him to have?

The blogosphere, with its wonderful but dangerous flexibility, can ruthlessly betray an author’s attitude toward his readers. Does he respect their precious time and keep things tight? Is he sensitive to their expectations? Is he willing to read the comments on his post and perhaps even respond to them? Dickens, one suspects, might have spent many hours online discussing the fate of Pip Pirrip or Little Nell. As for me, I’m glad to listen to editors and produce an article, and eager to have it widely read. But I’m relieved not to be contractually obliged to engage with readers afterward.

My interaction with ‘my readers’ here has been a mixed one. I still get very few comments on my posts, but some who comment do so quite frequently. Sadly, I am guilty of often not responding to comments. There is a large backlog of them on this site right now, and I keep telling myself that I will sit down and take care of them. But parenting is taking up a lot of time, as are my reduced work duties, and of course, so does the rest of my life (and blogging itself). Ironically, sometimes, it is the really thoughtful comment that gets lost because I hesitate to reply too quickly and say something silly. More often than not, this results in that comment remaining unanswered (and on at least two occasions has led to readers accusing me of not wanting to address their critical commentary).  I hope I have not lost too many readers this way. I have also, as noted before, lost a couple of readers, frequent visitors to the comments space, who had grown offended by my political stance. (This will probably happen again.) Those were visible, but obviously, some show up here once, and then leave because they do not find my writings congenial to their politics. (This must have happened during the period when I wrote several posts on the BDS controversy at Brooklyn College.)

While I do not think I will be able to address the issue of offending people by what I write here, I remain committed to answering comments as often, and as thoughtfully, as I can. I hope you’ll stick around and take my word for it.

Ten Years After: War Criminals Still Walk Free

You call someone a ‘mass-murdering war criminal’, you best not miss.  And so, when I use that term to describe the unholy troika of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld–as I have in the past–I should have very good reasons for doing so. Fortunately, that isn’t hard to do: a pretty systematic case for the appropriateness of that description can be found in this piece by Nicholas J. S. Davies–author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, a book length development of the same argument. Many others have made similar cases; googling ‘Bush war crimes’ , ‘Cheney war crimes’ and ‘Rumsfeld war crimes’ nets a pretty decent catch; similarly, crimes committed at Gitmo–torture, abuse and murder–implicate a host of other folks too: former deputy assistant attorney general John Choon Yoo, former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee, and former counsels Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes, for instance. (And of course, the prosecution of the war did not just hurt Iraq–and kill Iraqis–it hurt the US–and killed Americans too–as Juan Cole points out.)

This description can no longer be considered hyperbole. At the very least, even if one grants the highly offensive premise than an Iraqi life is worth less than an American life, it is clear a war conducted on false pretense–an illegal exercise of executive power–sent thousands of Americans to their death. Just that bare fact should convict the prosecutors of the war of mass murder.

So, what’s left to do? You could ask for prosecution of the criminals by the US justice system but the Obama administration has made it clear there will be no movement in this direction. That is entirely unsurprising, given the blending together of the national security policies of the two administrations. This obliviousness to the compelling moral logic of the war crimes case against the Terrible Trio should not however, blind us to the fact that,

[I]t is also a well-established principle of international law that countries who commit aggression bear a collective responsibility for their actions.  Our leaders’ guilt does not let the rest of us off the hook for the crimes committed in our name.  The United States has a legal and moral duty to pay war reparations to Iraq to help its people recover from the results of aggression, genocide and war crimes….

Turns out therefore, it is not enough to say ‘it was the Bush folks wot did it’ and do our best Pontius Pilate impression.  The responsibility for the Iraqi war is the American people’s.

PS: The killing hasn’t ended yet in Iraq:

Iraq closed a painful decade just as it began: with explosions reverberating around the capital.

Beginning in the early morning Tuesday with the assassination of a Ministry of Finance official by a bomb attached to his vehicle and continuing for hours, the attacks were a devastating reminder of the violence that regularly afflicts Iraq. And they somehow seemed more poignant coming on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the American-led invasion, which is being marked in the West by new books, academic studies and polls retesting public attitudes a decade later.

By midmorning, the familiar sight of black smoke rose above a cityscape of palm fronds, turquoise-tiled mosque domes and squat concrete buildings. By midafternoon, the numbers stacked up: 52 dead and nearly 180 wounded in separate attacks that included 16 car bombs, 2 adhesive bombs stuck to cars, and 1 assassination with a silenced gun.

The 1944 Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana Report

Today’s post continues a theme initiated yesterday: sensible views on drugs, expressed many, many years ago. Yesterday’s post referenced the New York Academy of Medicine’s 1955 report on opiate addiction. Today’s post goes back even further, to 1944. Then, as reefer madness swept the nation (WWII notwithstanding), New York City became the focus of a study on marihuana and its alleged effects. I’ll let Robert DeRopp take up the story in this excerpt from his Drugs and the Mind:

The cries of alarm continued nonetheless, particularly in the region of New York City, and so strident did the clamor become that some action seemed necessary. This action was taken by one of New York’s best-loved and most colorful mayors, Fiorello La Guardia, who sensibly concluded that his first duty was to discover the facts concerning the use of marihuana in the city, and on the basis of those facts, to take whatever steps seemed necessary. He accordingly requested assistance from the New York Academy of Medicine, which appointed a committee to obtain those facts of which the mayor was in need.

The report of the Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana, which was published in 1944, is a mine of valuable information, sociological, psychological, and pharmacological, concerning marihuana and its effects. The results are worthy of careful study because they place the whole phenomenon of marihuana smoking in the correct perspective and reveal the so-called “marihuana problem” as a minor nuisance rather than a major menace. In his foreword to the report, Mayor La Guardia himself remarked, “I am glad that the sociological, psychological, and medical ills commonly attributed to marihuana have been found to be exaggerated as far as New York City is concerned,” but observed that he would continue to enforce the laws prohibiting the use of marihuana “until and if complete findings may justify an amendment to existing laws.”

DeRopp describes these findings in some detail: the patterns of usage, the price of marihuana, the debunking of claims pertaining to its pernicious effects on crime, public morality, addiction and juvenile delinquency being the most prominent, and notes that the report concludes with the following words:

The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City are unfounded.

Unfortunately, as DeRopp goes on to note:

Needless to say, this calm report was not at all welcome to sensation-hungry journalists who saw themselves deprived of a valuable source of material for headlines. So after the publication of the mayor’s report there was much stormy correspondence, some of which invaded the pages of the medical press. Even the austere Journal of the American Medical Association abandoned its customary restraint and voiced its editorial wrath in scolding tones. So fierce was the editorial that one might suppose the learned members of the mayor’s committee–appointed, incidentally, by the New York Academy of Medicine–had formed some unhallowed league with the ‘tea-pad’ proprietors to undermine the city’s health by deliberately misrepresenting the facts about marihuana. 

This sounds extremely familiar. And there matters have stood for some seventy years now, even as the war on drugs continues in its idiotic, racist, misguided ways.

Note: The citation for the Mayor’s Committee report is: Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana. The Marihuana Problem in New York City. Jacques Cattell Press, Philadelphia, 1944

The New York Academy of Medicine on Opiate Addiction circa 1955

I’ve had a battered paperback titled Drugs and the Mind on my shelves for a while now, unread. As I’ve begun a minor purge of my shelves to get rid of books in bad condition, I’ve finally decided to give it a gander before giving it a toss. Written by one Robert S. DeRopp, it makes for depressing reading. This effect is produced by the realization that enlightened, less retrograde views on drugs and drug use have never been in short supply; they’ve just been steadfastly ignored.

In the chapter titled ‘Addicts and Addiction’ DeRopp quotes a New York Academy of Medicine report on opiate addiction, which after noting that ‘the punitive approach is no deterrent to the non-addict dealer or the addict,’ goes on to say:

There should be a change in attitude towards the addict. He is a sick person, not a criminal. That he may commit criminal acts to maintain his drug supply is recognized, but it is unjust to consider him criminal simply because he uses narcotic drugs….The addict should be able to obtain his drugs at low cost under Federal control, in conjunction with efforts to have him undergo withdrawal. Under this plan, these addicts, as sick persons, would apply for medical care and supervision. Criminal acts would no longer be necessary in order to obtain a supply of the drugs and there would be no incentive to create new addicts. Agents and black markets would disappear from lack of patronage. Since about eighty-five percent of the ‘pushers’ on the streets are said to be addicts, they would be glad to forgo this dangerous occupation if they were furnished with their needed drug. Thus the bulk of the traffic would substantially disappear….By a change in social attitude which would regard them as sick persons, and by relieving them of the economic oppression of attempting to obtain their supply of the drug at an exorbitant price, it will be possible to reach existing addicts in an orderly, dignified way, not as probationed persons or sentenced criminals. They would come under supervision in the interest of health, not because of an entanglement with the law. Thereafter, on a larger scale and in a humanitarian atmosphere, there would be an opportunity to apply persuasion to undergo rehabilitation. It is reasonable to expect that many might accept the opportunity.

De Ropp interjects at this point:

The report goes on to detail exactly how, though properly supervised clinics, the addict could be injected with the minimum amount of drug needed to keep him free of withdrawal symptoms.

and then continues the excerpt:

….All the while unrelenting attempts would be made to persuade the resistant addict to undergo therapy to break the habit. It will be seen that this recommendation is a humane, reasonable, and promisingly effective method of distribution….Every addict will get his drug. Under the present law to do that he must ‘push’ , rob, steal, burglarize or commit forgery. For he is desperate when he is without drugs.

1955. Read it and weep.

Note: The citation for the New York Academy of Medicine report is: Isbell, H. Medical aspects of opiate addiction. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. 31:886-902 (1955). In a future post, I will post excerpts from the 1944 Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana report. The commission was appointed by the then Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. That’ll make you weep too.

Physical and Psychological Affordance

According to Wikipedia, ‘an affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling.’ (A photograph of a tea set in the Wikipedia entry bears the caption, ‘The handles on this tea set provide an obvious affordance for holding.’) Later we learn that James J. Gibson introduced ‘affordance’ in his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances”; he ‘defined affordances as all “action possibilities” latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities.’

I do not now remember where I first encountered the term–perhaps in my readings of embodied cognition literature  in graduate school, probably. It has always struck me as a marvelously evocative term, and one of those that almost immediately serves to illuminate the world in a different light. We are physical beings, minds and bodies united, caught up in a tightly coupled system of world and agent; the world provides us affordances for our particular modes of interactions with it; we modify the world, modifying its affordances and change in response; and so on. The dynamic, mutually determining nature of this interaction stood clarified. Thinking of the world as equipped with affordances helped me envision the evolutionary filtration of the environment better; those creatures with traits suitable for the environment’s affordances were evolutionary successful. Knobs and cords can only be twisted and pulled by those suitably equipped–mentally and physically–for doing so.  Babies learn to walk in an environment that provides them the means for doing so–level, firm surfaces–and not others. An affordance rich environment for walking, perhaps equipped with handles for grasping or helpful parents reaching out to provide support, facilitates the learning of walking. And so on.

But ‘affordance’ need not be restricted to understanding in purely physical terms. We can think of the world of psychological actors as providing psychological affordances too. An agent with a particular psychological makeup is plausibly understood as providing for certain modes of interaction with it: a hostile youngster, bristling with resentment and suspicion of authority restricts the space of possibilities for other agents to interact with him; the affordances he provides are minimal; others are more capacious in the affordances they provide. A psychological agent’s life can be viewed as a movement through a space of affordances; his trajectories through it are determined by his impingement on others and vice-versa; he finds his responses modified by those that the space allows or affords. As parents find out when they raise a child, theories of learning and rearing only go so far; the particular make-up of the pupil feed back to the parent and can modify the rearing strategy; the child has provided only some affordances that work with the child-rearing theory of choice. An inmate in jail is stuck in a very particular domain of psychological affordances; he will find his reactions modified accordingly.

Thinking of our exchanges with the world and other human beings in this light helps illuminate our dependence  and influence on them quite clearly; we are not solitary trailblazers; rather at every step, we are pressed on, and push back. What emerges at every point and at the end bears the impress of these rich relationships with our environment, both physical and psychological.

A Crossfit Party with Strong Women

Last night, I attended a Crossfit party. During the party–held at Crossfit South Brooklyn–two very strong and fit women, Annie Thorisdottir and Lindsey Valenzuela, performed a grueling workout for ten minutes. (Perform as many rounds as possible of the following combination: five shoulder to overhead movements of a seventy-five pound barbell, ten deadlifts of the same barbell, followed by fifteen jumps on to a twenty-inch box).  There were bright lights, an MC, television cameras, loud music, a raucous, enthusiastic, admiring crowd that clapped and cheered as the two athletes went flat out, performing a workload, which would leave most normal human beings, if not dead, then at least violently sick. (Most folks in attendance were Crossfitters themselves; thus, at the least, they had performed versions of the workout themselves and known just how difficult it is to sustain that kind of non-stop physical effort for ten minutes.)

At the end of it all, Ms. Thorisdottir had performed twelve rounds of the workout and Ms. Valenzuela eleven. (And change for both.) This was the second of the extravaganzas that Crossfit stages in the ‘Open’ section of its Crossfit Games: worldwide, average Joe gym-goers perform a series of workouts; some qualify for the so-called Regionals; and then another cut takes place for the Crossfit Games. (Described rather elegantly by a friend as the ‘World Series of Competitive Exercise’.) Last night’s event, as befitting an organization committed to putting on a show, was announced midweek on a live streamed program, with the workout performed immediately as a contest between two athletes known for their proficiency and fitness. Ms. Thorisdottir has won the Crossfit Games for the last two years running and is a serious contender to go for a third this year. Both Ms. Thorsidottir and Ms. Valenzuela are accomplished weightlifters; Ms. Valenzuela in particular is a national level Olympic weightlifter and perhaps has aspirations to compete internationally. (A difficult time awaits her; American women weightlifters have struggled to make a mark in international competitions thus far; perhaps Crossfit’s embrace and popularization of Olympic lifting might make a difference in this dismal situation.)

Writing on the Crossfit South Brooklyn blog today, I described the workout-party as follows:

The carefully choreographed production of spectacle, the deployment of mass media high technology, the showmanship, the human body beautiful and strong, the invocations of gladiatorial combat, the centrality of women athletes, it all was quite something to witness.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the evening was the open admiration of men for women athletes, one not  couched exclusively in terms of their physical attractiveness. (Needless to say, the women in attendance were equally awestruck.) Sure, there was much talk of sensational derrieres, but overwhelmingly, the men present were in awe of the physical effort on display. This made for an interesting change from a pattern often visible at conventional sporting events; men often disdain the women’s events or accuse them of not working as hard, or performing as well, or being overpaid or some variant thereof.   Crossfit still has a way to go in addressing gender issues that arise in its spaces–more on that anon, someday–but it has managed to work toward providing a forum where female athletes are equally worthy of appreciation. Just for that, the event was a revelation.

Killing American Citizens Without Trial: The NYPD Way

The New York City Police Department is always ahead of the curve. They have aspirations to be a domestic surveillance service–after all, why should the FBI have all the fun?–and to secure all the budget increases and prestige that goes with it. Besides, don’t the movies tell us that ‘secret agents’ always get all the chicks? It also has international aspirations, which will suitably ratchet up its glamour quotient. Thus we heard last year about the NYPD’s collaboration with Israeli police, and the opening of a branch in Israel. This would considerably enhance the NYPD’s grab-bag of tricks pertaining to searching and frisking, especially when dealing with a hostile, recalcitrant subject population. Not that they don’t already have considerable experience with the good ‘ol up-against-the-wall-spread-your-legs move.

There is another area in which the NYPD have long been known as trailblazers. While the nation is agog with frenetic debate about the use of drones to kill American citizens without trial or due process on American soil, and law professors, bloggers, and sometimes Republican lawmakers, talk themselves hoarse about its ramifications, the NYPD with little fanfare, and plenty of ammunition, has been doing the same for many years: offing American citizens with nary the hint of either. Suspect identified; suspect shot. Cap in the ass, cap in the back, cap in the head. One more down, several–not yet identified but surely out there–to go.

This remarkably efficient procedure, directed primarily against American citizens of skin hues that approximate those that have met such a fate thus far–one of whom, it must be said, shares my first name–has not been conducted on distant, sandy, parched lands littered with shimmering mirages. Rather, these dispatches have been carried out in the midst of American cities, in urban landscapes.

To that list of urban spots, soon to be marked with flowers, candles, wreaths, and photographs of teenaged boys, we can now add East Flatbush, where, on the night of March 9th, Kimani Gray, all of sixteen years old, went down after being shot at eleven times. Seven bullets found their mark; four from the back. He seems to have made a threatening move; perhaps he had a gun. But he does not seem to have used it, if he had one. He’s dead though. Just another casualty in the ‘jungle out there.’ The officers who shot him are on ‘administrative duty.’ Perhaps this is NYPD code for all the paperwork they will now have to do in detailing the expenditure of ammunition and the cleaning charges incurred on their firearms.

There will be demonstrations; the mayor and the police commissioner will call for calm; there will be calls to not rush to judgment (although no calls to not shoot so damn fast); the slow–very slow!–wheels of police procedure and perhaps state justice will grind. At the end of it all, there will still be grieving parents. And one more photo added to the placards that will be observed the next time a march is held to protest the NYPD’s killing of yet another brown or black man in New York City.

The Glamorous Life: Waiting Tables on the Upper West Side

In the summer of 1994, broke and increasingly desperate, I roamed New York City, or rather, just Manhattan, looking for work as a bartender. I had worked as one before, in Newark, and hoped that I would find an employment venue which would provide me with the Holy Grail of bartending work: an interesting bar scene and plentiful tips. I could have looked for other kinds of employment; I did possess a graduate degree in computer science after all. But I was unwilling to take on a job that might suck me back into the world of nine-to-fivers, and part-time consulting gigs, after looking plentiful in the earlier part of the summer, had dried up again.  There was no campus employment to be found; my savings had evaporated; I had been reduced to being the recipient of handouts–leftover sandwiches–from a friendly waiter at a local diner. (Thanks Joe!)

So, I bought a copy of the Boston Bartenders Guide, refreshed my memory in case anyone subjected me to a quick viva on cocktails and set off. A week later, I was exhausted, a few pounds lighter, and sadly lacking in leads. It was summer; every bar-tending job in Manhattan seemed to have been taken.

But waiting tables was still possible. And indeed, one afternoon, as I walked through the Upper West Side on Amsterdam Avenue, stopping in at one restaurant after another, I was asked by the owner to turn up for work the next day, making sure to wear a pair of black trousers and a white shirt. I didn’t ask about wages or tips. Work awaited.

For the next few weeks, till classes began again in the fall, I was on call for waiter duties. I shadowed a veteran for a day to learn the ropes, made two dollars an hour, and contributed a percentage of my tips to the busboys (from Honduras and El Salvador). The waiters were allowed one free meal from the kitchen during our shift. The trade was simple: the veteran and I alternated in picking up customers from the front door, took ours to our side of the seating area, tried to get them to order drinks, wrote up food orders and rang the kitchen bell to let the cooks know, checked in at the table after serving food, pushed drinks again, kept an eye out for the check call, and so on.

It was tedious and tiring though, and our customers were often rude, impatient and cranky. I expected poor tipping at times, and I got it. I did wait tables on Al Sharpton once, and he was an excellent tipper. My boss had a sharp tongue and she used it quite often, making me feel like a cross between a poor student and a shiftless layabout. Despite these irritations, I was never compelled to spit in anyone’s soup. My biggest earnings came on a weekend when I worked 22 hours over a Saturday and Sunday and took home 110 dollars. Somehow, bizarrely, when all was said and done, I was earning five dollars an hour.  The busboys had it much worse; they worked longer hours; they had longer commutes; they made less money. This was a fool’s game. For all concerned.

A couple of weeks before the fall semester (and my partial assistantship) began, I quit abruptly. Rather, I simply didn’t turn up for work, and refused to answer calls. I was exhausted and worn out. I would never wait tables again. I still don’t understand how the restaurant industry functions.

Nietzsche on the Lazy Faithful

Those who read Nietzsche often find him very funny. (Some of those who read him find him extremely unfunny too, especially when the joke is on them.)  His humor sometimes sneaks in on you in the most unexpected of places. A good example is found in the following:

On the future of Christianity. – As to the disappearance of Christianity, and to which regions it will fade most slowly in, one can allow oneself a conjecture when one considers on what grounds and where Protestantism took root so impetuously. As is well known, it promised to do the same things as the old church did but to do them much cheaper; no expensive masses for the soul, pilgrimages, priestly pomp and luxury; it spread especially among the northern nations, which were not so deeply rooted in the symbolism and love of forms of the old church as were those of the south: for with the latter a much stronger religious paganism continued to live on in Christianity, while in the north Christianity signified a breach with antithesis of the old native religion and was from the beginning a matter more for the head than for the senses, though for precisely that reason also more fanatical and defiant in times of peril. If the uprooting of Christianity begins in the head then it is obvious where it will first start to disappear: in precisely the place, that is to say, where it will also defend itself most strenuously. Elsewhere it will bend but not break, be stripped of its leaves but put forth new leaves in its place–because there it is the senses and not the head that have taken its side. It is the senses, however, that entertain the belief that even meeting the cost of  the church, high though it is, is nonetheless a cheaper and more comfortable arrangement than existing under a strict regime of work and payment would be: for what price does one not place upon leisure (or lazing about half the time) once one has become accustomed to it! The senses raise against a deschristianized world the objection that too much work would have to be done in it, and the yield of leisure would be too small: they take the side of the occult, that is to say–they prefer to let God work for them (oremus nos, deus laboret! [let us pray, let God labor!]).

The buildup has been gradual; the section begins by inducing a few chuckles before returning to seriousness, and then builds up to the final punchline in Latin.  It is the imagery summoned up by that punchline that evokes the most mirth: the lazy devout, earnestly hoping their prayers will be adequate substitute for lack of effort in the here and now, the required labors outsourced to a hopefully existent God.

Note: Excerpt from Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits. Translated by RJ Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986; this version includes Volume 2: Assorted Opinions and Maxims, from which I have quoted Section 97 on page 233.

Reflections on Facebook, Part Three

Facebook statuses are legendary. They have been indicted ad nauseam as archives of exhibitionism, narcissism, boring and pointless navel-gazing, repositories of TMI, and many other sins. But they still repay some attention.

The Facebook status typically includes a prompt. The current one is ‘What’s on your mind?’ The one before that was ‘How are you feeling?’, and so on. When they first appeared, they appeared to invite completion by listing the user name followed by an ‘is’. So: ‘<Samir Chopra is> thinking deep thoughts’ or, ‘ wondering whether to go out on a shitty day like this’, and so on. Perhaps realizing the limitations of this form, and the stress it placed on its users to come up with appropriate completions, Facebook moved to the current open-ended style. And the floodgates were opened.

Like just about every Facebook user I indulge in nauseating displays of self-promotion in my status. In my defense, I will say that most of my status updates in this category have been restricted to links to good reviews of my books and updates on my blog posts. Sometimes, feeling especially proud of myself, I post juicy bits from the good reviews. (I intend to post bad reviews if they ever appear just so I can rip those reviewers a new one and court appropriate notes of sympathy from my friends.) I haven’t bragged yet about my wife in my status. I have, though, posted baby photos.

The status update, of course, like the Wall, is part of Facebook’s privacy-destructive architecture. Folks let us know where they are, what they are doing, what they are eating, and perhaps most interestingly, who they are spending time with. This last varietal has generated one of the most interesting social phenomena to emerge from Facebook: the ‘You Were Not Invited’ photo. In this wonderful addition to the list of ways in which social marginalization is effected and experienced, a Facebook user finds out that a clique exists within his social group that does not include him. For besides the usual ‘Having a great time at Joe’s Bar with my best buddies Louie and Dan’ status updates, Facebook users also post photographs of dinner parties for which our poor user never received an invitation. Not wanting to seem like a whiny little ingrate, he dutifully clicks ‘Like’ and writes something like ‘Seems like you guys had an awesome time!’

The Facebook status is perhaps best used by those making a political statement: petitions are sought to be signed, links posted to incendiary blog posts and rabble-rousing photographs with outraged annotations show up in our news feeds. These also have the salutary effect of bringing out the lice from the woodwork as many a Facebook user has found, much to his horrified dismay, that he cannot count on the usual Internet echo-chamber effect and instead must find a way to deal, perhaps politely, with a ‘friend’ who has displayed an opposing political polarity.

Still, despite this enlistment of the status for Changing the World, the status’ primary function still remains the Brag. About yourself or Someone Close to You. My irrepressibly rude comedian friend Radhika Vaz has penned the most memorable–if unrepeatable in polite company–line in this regard. Naturally, she did it in her status. To wit: ‘Ladies, if you really want to praise your husband on Facebook, just suck his dick instead. It’s what he really wants anyway, and that way, you’ll be the only one gagging.’

It’s hard to top that line, so I’m just going to call it quits right here.