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Tone is a complicated issue in evaluating writing of any kind. It matters: writing is rhetoric, not just content. Content is easier to dispute and correct: this is wrong, this is right, this is confused.

It’s hard to write about tone in a review of a book without complaining that the author should have written the book that you would prefer to have read (or even authored), in which you take yourself as an ideal, typical or important reader.

One example in my recent reading is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which I finally got around to finishing. It’s a strange sensation to finish a book where you agree with the basic premise, agree with many of the specific points, acknowledge that the author is quite aware about the history of the ideas that are important to him and still find yourself frequently annoyed as hell with the way he chooses to say it.

I’m all for teaching what Crawford calls “the practical arts”, I’d agree that visceral experience with the material world has a power that abstract knowledge does not have, and that there’s a power in knowing for yourself how things and machines work.

Part of my problem, I guess, is that he oversells his case. There are people who approximate what he calls craftsmen even in knowledge work, for one, who have the agency and ethos that he sees as systematically absent from that world. He often takes material objects, machines and technologies as artifacts which simply exist for the practical, craftmanslike person to work with, showing little interest in the processes by which new technologies are imagined, designed or implemented until or unless they become something he disdains because they are no longer easily accessible to craftsmanlike tinkering. He’s got a fairly shop-worn (pun intended) critique of consumer culture, which is banal but tolerable until you stop to think a bit about the fact that the business that puts bread on his table is maintaining vintage motorcycles that his customers drive for fun down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hello, 21st Century leisure and consumption! It’s not exactly reshoeing the plow horse for the Widow Stevens so she can plant enough wheat for the coming winter.

Maybe it’s that he complains about erudition but keeps most of his polemic afloat with plenty of readings and citations and some cherrypicking. The best two chapters in the book are his “Education of a Gearhead” about his concrete experiences in motorcycle repair and a small bit of the following chapter on his white-collar discomforts: the rest of it feels, a bit like Sandra Tsing Loh’s essay, like a personal conviction in search of a social narrative, as if his own discoveries and experiences aren’t enough to keep it going. It feels, in that sense, both padded and lacking in confidence, as if he wants his old think tank buddies to think well of him and believes that they won’t unless he speaks their language as well as the new literacy he’s discovered.

Maybe it’s just tone, and personal taste. There was all of what I liked in the book, which was quite a bit. Then I had some more dispassionate questioning of some of his evidence or interpretations. And then there was a growing amount of irritation with the way he chose to say it.

Crawford doesn’t like technologies which automate some aspect of their functioning, which take the manual agency of the user out of the picture. Fine, I guess, but it’s sort of an arbitrary line in a lot of technologies, not to mention a feature of technological history which waxes and wanes rather than moves in a steady line.

What triggered me off, and kept me triggered as I read the rest of the book was a complaint about faucets which have infrared or motion sensors rather than handles.

Crawford writes, “Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elict a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers. It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.” pp. 55-56

This is like an Andy Rooney monologue that’s gotten in bed with a raging polemic and produced a child more irritating than either. What, a faucet is somehow agency because you turn it? Agency over what? A massive infrastructure which brings the water up through the faucet? Crawford’s got a footnote in which he concedes this very point, as if he read the passage over again and felt sheepish about it. It’s not just the exaggeration of the point itself that annoyed me, however. If you’ve got a first-person point to make, make it with the right pronoun. What’s so hard about, “I find it irritating to wave my hands in front of the infrared sensor”? And seriously, “it offends the spirited personality”? They make spirited personalities pretty fragile where Crawford comes from, I guess.

When the tone is that wrong once, I find I’m much more sensitive to similar off notes and ill graces for the rest of a text. Save for when he’s squarely focused on his own experiences with machinery, Crawford frequently slips into this distanced third-person voice and makes universal and abstract pronouncements on work and agency and human dignity.

It’s not just that I feel a cussed desire to argue with even the statements I’m sympathetic to, but that somehow this voice, this tone, is far away from the substantive argument of the book: not concrete, not practical, not rooted in experience, not visceral. It feels like he’s trying too hard to validate his choices in a sweepingly universal way, as diktat rather than proposition, the same way that Loh feels like she’s writing about anything, everything, that will keep her from having to look too long in the mirror.

I still think that PointPoint is a scapegoat of sorts, that bad pedagogy that uses PowerPoint was bad before PointPoint or even personal computers were involved in higher education. That said, I think Carolyn Blogs and her commenters pretty well nail what’s scandalous about some common uses of PowerPoint by professors: basing entire classroom sessions around reading off pre-made slides sold by textbook publishers is the kind of practice that a student who is paying tuition should be furious about. But it’s safer to keep your head down, finish a requirement, get your degree, and move on. If there aren’t many professors around in a given program who are teaching in a much more professional, committed way, what’s the point in protesting?

If you’re going to use presentation software, there’s a basic ground floor of competence. Some of the basics:

1) Don’t read a slide. Ever. Ever ever. The slide is there for people to look at. A professor should be saying something else while the slide is there. Something longer, something fuller, something more explanatory, something expert, something knowledgeable. A slide with pure text is not ideal under any circumstances, but if it’s there, it’s there as a mnemonic designed to summarize points that a professor is making at greater length, with more passion, in a way that justifies and rewards the physical presence of students in that room at that moment. Your lecture outline is for you. It’s not to be put up on a slide on the board and read verbatim. Ever.

One of the fascinating things about this point is that almost everyone seems to agree with this dictum, and yet…how many times have you sat through presentations where someone reads their slides verbatim? Quite a few of those for me, and I work in a discipline where very few faculty or students even use presentation software.

2) A slide is either an image, film clip or audio that’s an impressionistic, performative accompaniment to something being said, or it’s information. If it’s information, it should be up and visible for a long time, so that students can write it down, take notes on it, relate it to what is being said in a verbal lecture or explanation.

3) A good presentation takes as much time to create as a good lecture, essay, or anything else of the sort. It should be practiced, edited and thought about as much as other kinds of classroom preparation. It should be the work of the professor who is responsible for a given class. If it’s unethical to read a lecture prepared for you by a company, it’s unethical to read a presentation prepared for you by a company.

4) There should be some compelling reason why presentation software is being used, something it can do which adds particular and necessary value to a given lecture or class session. I rarely use presentation software, but one thing I have used it for is an opening lecture in my Image of Africa course where I show about fifteen slides on the history of depictions of missionaries or other whites in cannibal cookpots. In that context, it’s a much easier way to convey that information than older slide technologies, especially when I want to integrate film clips, audio or even bits of older text or quotations into the presentation. (I use a bit from an Abbott and Costello film in the presentation, for example.) If there isn’t a compelling reason, don’t do it. Ever.

So last week, during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, there was this statement, quoted in the New York Times:

“Of course you want to set up a system where an institution dreads the day it happens because management gets whacked, shareholders get whacked and the board gets whacked,” said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. “But you don’t want to create a system that raises great uncertainty and changes what institutions, risk management executives and lawyers are used to.”

We got to the brink of a global financial meltdown that was demonstrably a result of the system that institutions, risk management executives and lawyers were “used to”. We’re still clinging to the edge of the abyss, in fact. But here we have the people whose practices got us all into that mess talking to the people who went ahead and allowed it to happen, and the resulting consensus seems to be a big thumb’s up to go ahead and do it again. So yeah, I have a sick, uneasy feeling that fifty years or a hundred years hence, that quote is going to be a great example of willful blindness to the icebergs dead ahead.

I’m planning to attend: I think it’s a really important issue. I worry a lot about many of our students in this respect. While they’re here their writing may improve, their skills in using various academic disciplines may deepen, their knowledge of a particular subject or field may grow very impressively. But many students who grow in those ways do not necessarily become better at speaking or at presenting themselves effectively, not even in the controlled environment of classroom discussion. To be honest, I think some of our students become worse at self-presentation and speaking skills in their time here. Some adapt too strongly to the narrow particularity of academic conversation. Other students get too used to political or social engagement with a community that politely indulges most of their demands or arguments or has a fairly strong consensus culture, never really experiencing serious disagreement or plurality of opinion. I’ve occasionally suggested, semi-seriously, that I feel like we train some students as the speaking and presentation equivalents of baby seals on the ice, waiting to get clubbed.

I think this is a generic problem at a lot of colleges and universities, mind you. The only distinctive aspect of it I see at Swarthmore is the intense value that students and faculty put on being mutually supportive and not seeming to want to show up other students with showy or critical comments. (This is not to say that we completely lack students who are flamboyantly talkative, but I feel as if there’s a bit more reluctance here to stand apart.) In a lot of ways, this is a good part of the culture of the college, but it hobbles students a bit when the time comes closer to graduation to have to present themselves as confident, capable individuals whom someone should fund, admit or hire.

In general, this is why setting out to teach self-presentation is a tricky business. For one, it’s genuinely difficult to assess or grade self-presentation or speaking in a way where feedback works to help a student improve. The major pedagogy you need is more akin to the pedagogy employed in performance or studio art, where the professor needs to react in the moment, and where some of the feedback needs to be as public and shared as the speaking itself might be. That can get very sticky or emotionally fraught for many students. If you’re in a performance class, you expect that kind of judgment. If you’re in a small discussion class focused on an academic subject, you might not be so willing to go through that gauntlet.

More importantly, effective presentation of self is really not reducible to “public speaking” in the old way that this subject was once taught. I got into this issue a bit in a discussion about education and careers at 11d. When schools like Swarthmore tout the virtues of critical thinking and a liberal arts education for the long-term job prospects of our graduates, we tend to stress the value of flexibility and adaptability, that the liberal arts graduate can change as circumstances change. I think that’s basically correct.

Effective self-presentation is a big part of that adaptability, however. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t really matter whether you can think well. Arguably, you can’t think well unless you can speak and present well.

Presenting knowledge or arguments effectively involves putting together a lot of different sub-skills on the fly. You have to understand the context in which you’re presenting, you have to be able to very quickly read the organizational sociology of that context. You need to be able to quickly pick up cues about the psychology and cultural habitus of your audience and adjust when it’s not what you planned for. You have to know when what you’re arguing for is impossible or implausible, and whether there’s something else to ask for, when you’re setting the stage for a long-term objective or just making a temporary response to a situation that won’t repeat itself, when to yield and when to hold firm.

This is all very difficult to teach not just because it can be delicate to give real-time feedback to students, but because it involves some interpersonal, emotional and psychological skills which are not commonly made explicit or discussed as skills. You can’t just teach about those skills in a classroom setting, either. Students have to do other things to learn them: get involved in organizations, work in a group, play on a team, take responsibility for a decision.

On those rare occasions where ideas like “emotional intelligence” receive pedagogically explicit attention, they tend to be constrained to painfully bland normative managerial discourses, to be entirely about how we should get along well with others, play nice with other children, be good citizens, and so on. This is deadly. It’s better not to talk about this stuff at all than talk about it in these terms.

If you teach skills in an academic environment, you’ve got to be prepared to make those skills intellectually lively, contentious, open to interpretation and argument. When I teach writing or reading, I’m not just teaching how to write or read, I’m asking whether and when to do those things, studying why we read or write, discussing what the limits to writing or reading might be. Skills have to be as open to the question, “So what?” as any other subject matter, and you have to teach with a willingness to accept a wide variety of answers to that question.

If we’re going to teach something like “emotional intelligence” as a part of skillful presentation-of-self, one explicit premise from the outset needs to be that we are not teaching how to be a good person or play nice in the sandbox. There are people who are highly skilled at purposeful self-presentation who present as eccentric or as gadflies or as disciplinarians. Effectiveness as a speaker or a presenter is not a function of how nice or respectful or caring you are.

In his working life as an attorney, my father was extremely skilled at reading situations and “dialing in” the self-presentation that would most effectively push for the outcomes he was professionally committed to seeking: he could be just another guy with the guys, he could be the bullfighter jabbing and inciting an opponent, he could be light and funny or volcanic and volatile.

Like more than a few highly effective professionals, he didn’t have the same nimbleness and flexibility when he was outside the focused environment of his workplace. The key point as far as higher education goes is: that’s your problem, your life, work it out yourself.

What we’re concerned with is the competencies you have as a thinking, educated person. Personality can be an issue in learning skillful self-presentation: a narcissist or neurotic by their nature has a hard time with critical parts of the skill-set, such as being able to imagine how you sound to other people or how you’re coming off in the context you’re in. But personality shouldn’t inhibit most people from a baseline competence in self-presentation. Shy or bold, introvert or extrovert, quiet or talkative, nice or asshole: those are not limit conditions.

Sometimes, though, it’s a lot simpler: it’s a big organization that doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about and thus being all thumbs when it sets out to act. Case in point: the American Medical Association has a group that looks on an annual basis at the representation of smoking in the movies. The report uses standard media effects analysis, which is to say that it already starts with a lamentably crude understanding of what culture is and how it works.

It’s not wrong to say that Humphrey Bogart’s films helped give smoking a stylish, beautiful image at an earlier moment in American life, for example. That was then, though: films which helped give smoking an embedded attraction did their work within a time and place, and they did their work subtly, even when the message was not at all subtle (as, for example, in early television advertising for cigarettes).

Today? Well, the AMA report names the film Land of the Lost as the chief menace seducing the nation’s youth to the vile ways of tobacco. Land of the Lost. The biggest flop of the summer. Featuring a Will Ferrell character who is a pompous professorial ass. Who smokes a pipe as a sign of his pomposity. Why is the film the No. 1 cultural villain? Because you multiply the number of times smoking appears in a film by the number of people who saw it and the number tells you how many people’s minds had impressions of smoking ground into them.

It doesn’t matter if the film was a flop or critically reviled. It doesn’t matter if Dr. Rick Marshall is very nearly the utter opposite of Sam Spade in every imaginable respect. It doesn’t matter what culture means or how it works. A simple multiplication saves you from having to deal with anything messy or complicated. Number of representations times number of ticket sales. It’s science, I tell you, science.

I liked the talk and agreed with the argument. I got a bit fixated on one point, far more fixated than Packard does: the contrast between the local context of bed net usage and the technocratic, distant language used about bed net usage in top-level malaria control discourse like the Global Malaria Action Plan. That plan notes very briefly that there are challenges with “end-user compliance”, but not to worry: there’s a place in the plan for coordinated use of communication and behavior change methodologies.

Some of the arguments going back and forth between Jeffrey Sachs and Dambisa Moyo about bed nets are screwed up, partly because Moyo takes a lot of the current critique of development aid from Easterly, Calderisi and other authors and takes away a lot of the complexity and texture of that work. Moyo is convinced that the problem with giving bed nets away is that you put African bed net producers out of business, which really misses the point. I also think the “give bed nets away or sell them” argument isn’t a meaningful or helpful argument about bed net usage in Africa or elsewhere, it’s an argument about an orthodoxy in economics.

Sachs, on the other hand, is pretty much stuck in the same place that the GMAP is when it comes to figuring out why people don’t use bed nets: his perspective is too removed, too far from the actual situations of people who are or are not using bed nets. He knows they should do it, and if they aren’t doing what they should do, then just do some education or something.

Language like “end user compliance” wards off the lived reality of human life like a garlic wards off a vampire. Big plans and sweeping frameworks subcontract out the problem of the local and particular to some yet-to-be-named partner organization who will be charged with dealing with end user compliance in a sensitive, community-engaged, bottom-up, gender-attentive, ethnographically nuanced manner. That way, when the news filters up that end user compliance doesn’t meet expectations, you can just imagine that you haven’t met the right partner organizations yet or that the methodology for securing compliance needs some tweaking. You didn’t get enough medical anthropologists. The medical anthropologists weren’t properly integrated into the plan. Something like that.

The big plan never has to trouble itself with understanding the scene of everyday life or meeting the end users as human beings living in particular places. The big plan doesn’t have to bring what a smart medical anthropologist might tell it about why people use or don’t use bed nets into the language or thinking of the big plan. That’s the subcontractor’s problem. But it’s on these questions that big plans of all kinds stand or fall, and they can only be thought and engaged properly in their own terms, not in bloodlessly technocratic language.

You have to be able think at the top level, in the big plan, about local ideas about illness and local ideas about sleep, local arrangements of household space, local furnishings, local material conditions. And understand that these things vary.

The top planners have to understand that in historic terms, it’s perfectly sensible to mistrust development organizations in many parts of the world. Sometimes they have had actively bad ideas that caused damage to local communities and sometimes even when they have had good ideas, they only pursued them for a short while until they got bored or distracted or there was a new fad or a change in political administrations or the money dried up. Then the people who really bought into the good idea were left holding the sack.

The top planners have to get away from data that shows that bed net usage has a huge impact on malaria transmission to understand that sleeping under a bed net can be uncomfortable and annoying. That many adults who’ve had malaria tend to treat the disease the way we treat the flu: annoying, frustrating, a bit scary, but tolerable. It’s not hard to wash your hands and use hand sanitizer regularly, and those cut transmission of the flu. But for a lot of people, the minor hassle of regular hand sanitizing isn’t quite worth whatever percentage fewer times you’d have a cold or flu.

Every public health campaign that starts from the premise that there’s a simple and rational preventive behavior change that people of course should adopt is setting itself up for failure, because it’s not thinking clearly about how most human beings in general inhabit the landscape of habit and convenience and risk-calculation, let alone local cultural framings of those same things. Public health campaigns sort of start by taking educated professional white Americans and their particular cluster of common attitudes and cultural postures as the norm and everything else as uncompliant end usage or uneducated deviance. Among other things, if you want to convince people to better safeguard their own health and the health of other people around them, you’d better back up a bit and find out whether they care much about their own health and the health of other people around them. That’s not a universal, and not caring doesn’t make someone a monster or a sociopath. If I lived in a world that was full of political disorder, economic failure, endemic violence, if planning for the future was a sick joke, I might find it faintly ridiculous when some well-meaning person kept telling me how important it was to sleep under a bed net.

If you’re planning for action, well, this is what action really is all about. Anybody can make a comprehensive ten-point plan that neatly subdivides the messiness of lived experience into dry subheadings while keeping an antiseptic distance from that messiness.

If nothing else, when you look at the things which the scientists think represent reality’s retroactive work at stopping Higgs-boson-creating projects, reality turns out to have a pretty subtle grasp of politics and social dynamics as well as the engineering vulnerabilities of the LHC.

The thing I really worry about is that this adds the most awesome excuse to the armament of students everywhere. “I would have finished my math homework last night, but reality reached back through time and made me play a video game instead, because if I get good at math I will help to create a Higgs boson at some point in the future.”

Working on a couple of new projects, I’ve been diving back deeply into catalogs and search spaces and portals. It’s mostly been a depressing experience. Here and there, I have a satisfying feeling that something I’ve used for years has steadily improved. Our own local catalog Tripod is so vastly better in basic design and navigation than a decade ago that it’s almost startling. Another old stalwart, JSTOR, feels more intuitive in its design than it once did.

Travel across various search spaces and databases, though, and several basic frustrations arise.

1. Databases which default to an advanced rather than simple interface upon first access. Sometimes that’s because a portal points to the advanced interface, sometimes it’s because the basic interface is a hidden or obscured option.

2. Basic interfaces which are cluttered or require toggling four or more separate drop-down menus or other settings even to carry out a basic search.

3. Advanced interfaces which are really cluttered, with constraining menus, toggles or radio buttons scattered across multiple columns. Sometimes a search page looks like someone vomited up every kind of interactable object that’s ever been used in a form or UI. (Or as in the case of ISI Web of Science, with a marketing slogan at the top that’s made to look like interactable text.)

4. Diversity of interface designs. By now, we really should be converging on a common design. Instead, every vendor seems to feel an obligation to maintain a different design as a branding tool, not to aid users.

5. Constant shuffling and pointless tinkering with the UI for databases. It’s one thing to make a really big shift (say, towards an inviting basic entry-point interface away from a cluttered entry-point advanced interface) and another thing to constantly move menus around in a page layout. But the latter is very common behavior.

6. Really low standards for the quality of digitization and for searching within digitized text. JSTOR is a happy exception, but some other digitization projects are just hair-tearingly poor once you get into the nitty-gritty and start to make serious use of the resources they hold. There’s at least one company doing archival digitization where I find the type of material they’re digitizing appealing but I’m prepared to argue against ever buying anything they’re doing because the design and usability standards of their work are so slapdash.

7. Fragmentation of material. Rather than moving towards amalgamation and interoperability across databases, you really get the sense that everybody’s been busy grabbing at whatever piles of text they can lay their hands on, building the biggest little mudhill they can manage to put up, and then building walls around it. There are interstitial services that help a user “jump” from one little fragmented collection to another and portals that aim to be a “top level” to return to, sure, but we should be doing better by now.

Several years ago, my feeling was that the main forces opposed to Google’s digitization of libraries were some of same groups and interests opposed to digitization in principle, or to open-access forms of publication.

Sure, there were also those with specific suspicions about Google’s intentions, most particularly regarding how the company intended to profit from the project. In retrospect, those suspicions were warranted.

Back when the digitization of some big academic libraries began under Google’s supervision, the company tended to politely sidestep direct questions about their own financial interests in the project. I recall several conversations I was involved in where the speculation was that Google intended to operate a book store to compete with Amazon, focused on in-print books that turned up in searches.

Or that the company was interested in working on the next frontier of problems with search technology itself, which required going beyond the clever mirroring that Google presently employs (e.g., using people do on the web as a kind of map of how knowledge is connected and what kind of knowledge is important). Searching a huge space of scanned books and document for relevant content might take a completely different approach to work well, and that approach might add up to a technology as lucrative as Google’s initial approaches to search turned out to be. Or that the company would somehow link the project to its existing advertising business.

The fear was always that Google would try to grab hold of the “orphan works” in large research libraries once they were digitized and sell those back to research institutions on an exclusive basis, to become the king vendor atop the mountain of digital databases. Well, once the settlement took on concrete shape, that turned out to be exactly where the company was heading.

I was initially welcoming to Google’s initiative because I believe that digitization is crucial for the improved dissemination of knowledge. I think scholars in many fields have been for a great many years frustratingly indifferent to dissemination as a primal commandment. Digitization at this scale is expensive, so I was always open to the idea that Google would try to make back its money in some fashion. The problem is that they’ve chosen to try and make it back in the one manner that will permanently impede rather than enable new conditions of information circulation.

Brin disingenuously suggests that out-of-print work is available now only to those who can afford to hop on a plane and fly to a library which holds such work. There’s a very small class of materials about which this is true: rare books, archival holdings and the like. Which are not the materials being digitized at the moment. Otherwise, there are a fairly large number of institutions which participate in inter-library loan or in more regional equivalents. The books may have to fly on a plane, but not the researchers.

Making a Google-digitized collection available to libraries for an annual fee doesn’t permanently open up that collection to a wider circulation. The basic problem with the entire economy of digitized research materials at the moment is that the whole apparatus has become a gun held permanently to the temple of libraries: work that they formerly owned outright is now rented for variable fees from vendors who are mostly interested in the extension of their own monopolies over information rather than on lowering barriers to use. Google’s entry into that economy just turns that gun into a rocket launcher.

I don’t mind it if Google Book Search recaptures its costs through ad revenue or through sales of in-print books. I don’t really care that much about whether the revenue goes to a rights-holder, or about making efforts to find rights-holders. I think some of that concern is a red herring, and is mostly about making sure that existing publishers get whatever cut of the pie they think they can snatch out of the whole deal. Scholars mostly don’t research and disseminate for royalty payments. Worrying about a slightly bigger share of chump-change is for chumps.

I do mind if the orphan-works content of Google Book Search is something that Google owns and sells access to on a vendor basis. When Brin titles his piece, “A Library to Last Forever”, my instinctive riposte is “A Monopoly to Last Forever”, that this is the worst kind of digital enclosure at the largest possible scale. This is really one of those moments where we either make digitization something that permanently opens up a knowledge-producing commons or something that permanently is controlled and exploited by a single interest.

In that context, it’s not only unconvincing for Brin to defend the project in terms of its urgent necessity, it’s actively hackle-raising that he does so. When I hear something like, “Hey, don’t worry about the fine print or the nitty-gritty details, we can work that out later. The most important thing is that we get it done, right? Think of the children!” what I hear instead is, “Ya got trouble, my friend, right here in River City”.

It kind of says something about the world in general (as well as the past Administration) at this moment if default statesmanship carried out within ordinary interstate institutions seems like a major contribution to peace.

Yeah, I get it, it’s for being Not-George-Bush.

The Nobel Peace Prize kind of seems to me to need a conceptual overhaul. Make it something more like the Nobel Prize for Contributions to Democratic Civil Society or some such.

Update: Memorable quote from State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley: “We think that this gives us a sense of momentum when the United States has accolades tossed its way rather than shoes.”