This came up yesterday in a bar, but it's fairly useful in politics, other work contexts, and I imagine in arguments where one knows one is right, is going to lose (whether by virtue of force, or more usually because winning has insanely high costs), and is feeling a bit spry.

I often say, "P is not a unicorn." Then people ask me what I mean, and I say that the sort of characteristics that they are implying to P, while I "totally" like P, are in fact part of the very different Unicorn set which contains P, but is sadly also non-real. This is very useful, because instead of someone making the argument P->Q and me having to assert !P to get at Q (sometimes !P can be very impolitic), I can just say that Unicorns don't exist (and hence no modus ponens from Unicorn propositions).

I was reading Michael Huemer's very lively, good, and I think wrong essay on moral objectivism, when lo! my favorite sublogical device was realized (and in 1992, meaning that his Unicorns have priority on my Unicorns (a little joke, since denying that Unicorns have properties is part of the Unicorn argument). He states:

It [moral relativism as meta-ethical theory] is then comparable to the study of unicorns. Nothing positive you say about unicorns can be true since there aren't any unicorns. And it makes no sense to say, "Well, I agree that unicorns are not real, but I still think this is a unicorn.

Ding. Michael would probably object to me using raising the unicorns at all, but since I only bring them up to deny them, he'll have to suffer me gladly. Black Swans and modus tollens in a swift nut-shell, and better, because it's an argument about the lack of properties of impossible objects that resemble actual objects, rather than a denial of properties or extensions of actual objects. !Unicorn is always, always, less insulting to that gal than !P.

Update: corrected the spelling of Professor Huemer's name. Sorry about that.

It's a statement--a confession, really--that can arouse the ire of even the most even-tempered and forgiving of academics and intellectuals, or, at the very least, invoke a modest form of pity, of condescendence: some incarnation of "love the sinner, not the sin" fashioned for the non-ecclesiastic: I do not like to read.

Violently, almost. I'll try to sit down with a book, and will be fine for the first fifteen minutes, until I realize that there really are far too many words for the page, or that the lighting in the room isn't quite right, or--most usually--that the author is boring me. And the solution, of course, is easy: I'll move to a different room, or a more comfortable chair, or I'll try to renew my zeal for the book (but maybe something will happen soon, I'll say, or, there's got to be something that happens with that). But the end is inevitable: I invariably don't finish. It's crushing, really, to look at all the books that I've skimmed, read selections of, taken bits and chapters of, and laid aside for when I'm older, or more ready for the material, blatantly avoiding the awful truth that if I'm not ready for Dostoyevsky or Calvino by the age of twenty-four, my time may just never come.

I argue that this isn't all my fault. I simply can't stand many authors. Were Jonathan Franzen any more self-obsessed, he'd fall into the lake and drown (I'm not the only one who thinks this, I know...). David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, the entire magical realist lot--it's hard, really, to try to get past the poetry, the fervent, short attention-spanned prose, and attempt to distill the actual meaning. And yes, I realize there's a double standard here: I can't possibly respect any author who manages to keep my attention. I hate Mitch Albom precisely because of the fact that I managed to get through one of his books in the space of a plane flight. Kurt Vonnegut, too, has fallen off the list precisely because he's able to keep me in wrapt attention, by pushing precisely the correct buttons, my emotionally tickling me in the right places. And although it's good while it lasts, it feels cheap and empty after it's done: another book which perhaps I'll read one more time, but one that's fundamentally not one I'll cherish. And there are authors I want, hope against hope, to like: Nabokov, James, Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Calvino, Proust, because I know they'll deliver. But then, there's always the fear they won't, or that there's just too much of me invested in their work, and they'll never come through for me.

Perhaps it's the heartbreak that keeps me away from books. Reading a book is a lot of investment, both temporally and emotionally, and it's too disappointing to reach the end of a book and ask whether that, ultimately, was it. I suppose it's easy to read more into the act: to try to identify with the characters, to read into them what I may or may not have experienced, but, after all is said and done, I am, was, and never will be a Holden Caulfield, and I have no plans to flee from Troy, aflame, with an old man on my back, a boy in my hand and a collection of idols in my arms. The best books, in my experience, aren't necessarily about relating to the characters or even about liking the author. After all, what's there to relate to in Mrs. Dalloway? How can I even begin to understand Nick or Gatsby? There's something about being able to trust the author not to screw up: that the book isn't going to try and trick you, that the end will be, on some level, satisfying and, yes, edifying, regardless of how depressing or even uneventful.

So here's the irony: I can do symphonies. I can't explain it. Of all the analogous musical genres, I relate the symphony most to the novel, again, for the same level of depth and investment. I'm engrossed by Mahler, arguably the most Franzen-esque of the great symphonists, precisely because he tells every detail of his psyche distilled into one two-hour musical epic. And it's draining--perhaps even more than novels. It's not only emotionally, but--yes--physically draining to hear a good performance of Mahler 2, not to mention hearing it over and over--revisiting every detail. But the payoff is proportional to the investment: with Mahler, I can be sure that my investment of hours, days, weeks, and sometimes even months, will result in as much as I can possibly harvest.

But the novel is awful in this respect: the initial investment is so incredibly high for a result that may or may not be worth the price. That the attention span for a good work needs to be so unwavering and complete for the first pass to even call it a worthwhile encounter, let alone future encounters, delvings, excavations, ultimately, for the crushing heartbreak of an author simply not worth it.

I, for one, have no problem with Amber's $1,000 handbag. All her points are valid, but I will take the opportunity to climb back onto my usual craftsmanship high horse. Quality is worth paying for. And it's as true for clothes as it is for food.

At my uncles' carpet shop, they're often asked why their rugs are $5,000 when the rug sold by the dealer down the street is $500. The difference, they inevitably respond, is that their rug was made by some old lady in the traditional way in a small village in the middle of Iran. The other rug was made in an Afghani knotting factory by bonded child labor. If you want that particular old lady, and other old ladies, to make rugs in the future, you should pay $5,000. If you don't, they'll either go away, or turn into Afghani bonded child labor knotting factories. The choice is in your wallet. And so it is with clothes. Do we want Samuelsohn, say, to continue taking care with their relatively moderately priced clothes? Are Jermyn Street and Saville Row going to survive as anything more than theme park parodies of themselves? If so, then people who can pay must pay, and they must pay for things made right. It's as simple as that. And, for once, the solution is libertarian, and free, and completely consonant with proper economics.

Such things are not about display. Flashy shoddily made crap is often much more prestigious than the quiet dignity of good things. In food, you go to the temples of foams and syringes to be seen, and to a real restaurant to eat. And it is much better from a display point of view to wear Armani than to have a tailor make you a real suit, which will not have a label. The bespoke suit, after all, is made not to be noticed. The difference, I think, is between the man who monograms his sleeve, so that all can see, and the man who monograms his shirts under his jacket, so that only he knows. The two people are after different things, and I see nothing wrong with the latter (indeed, I see nothing wrong with the former, but it is not me).

Maybe I've spent too much time trying to rationalize indulgence. But to me there is virtue here. I (will in the future) pay for good things because I'd like the people who make them to stay around, like I pay for opera rather than not, like I make a point to see boxing live to help keep it in one piece. Others who don't value such things are welcome to make other choices.

What is Baby Bourbon? How does the Federal Register's definition of bourbon differ from what it was in the 1960s? How do charred and un-charred oak barrels fit in? What about whiskey aged in garbage bags? Eric Asmiov answers all of these questions and more in The Pour.

Loveliness is rare and must be pursued with abandon.

Rick Garnett has some interesting reflections on recent trends in the state death penalty, noting that while state legislatures have been expanding the reach of the death penalty, clemency moves have come largely from executives and judges. This seems of a piece with our shared modern attitude toward the death penalty generally. We-- or at least a sizable enough fraction of us as to constitute the relevant swing vote-- appear to be quite committed in the abstract to death as a retributive moral principle. But in concrete cases, we can often be quite chary about actually imposing it.

This leads to broad legislative principle with more reluctant executive implementation-- a pretty common dynamic in administrative law, of which the administration of death may be a special case.