Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Happy July 4! What’s more American than a minivan, especially one whose engineering and construction is managed by a foreign company because most of us are too busy watching baseball, denouncing the Trumpenfuhrer, and taking OxyContin?

This post is based on (a) three years of driving a 2014 Odyssey EX-L, and (b) test-driving a 2018 Odyssey EX-L.

The user interface is dramatically changed from 2014 to 2018. The 2014 Odyssey has traditional round-dial (i.e., graphical) tachometer(!) and speedometer front and center. The 2018 shows you mostly two big digits, e.g., “37” if you’re going 37 mph. This is presented with no context so it is harder for your brain to interpret than a needle’s position on a dial. The EX-L lacks any kind of navigation database, so the big digital readout of current speed is not presented next to the speed limit for the road segment (Tesla does this a lot better). Setting cabin temperature on the old Odyssey was done with a wide knob that one could easily reach by feel and then turn a couple of clicks to adjust temps. The driver would never need to take his or her eyes off the road for this. On the new/improved Odyssey, the temperature adjustment is a paddle switch that is harder to find and then has to be toggled up. Make sure to take your eyes off the road to verify that the temperature setting is moving to where you want it. The transmission stalk on the old Odyssey, which provides an idiot-proof mechanical interface and simultaneous display of whether the car is in Park, Reverse, or Drive, has been replaced by a set of switches. Push the Park button and then check the display behind the steering wheel to see if a big P lights up. Push down on the Reverse button to get into reverse. Push the “D/S” button to go into Drive.

Can someone explain to me why all of these changes are improvements?

[Consumer Reports:

Beneath the infotainment system are the frustrating transmission push-button controls, similar to those experienced in other Honda and Acura models. This non-conventional setup comes across like a child’s developmental toy, as each action operates slightly differently. It requires careful attention when making a selection, proving cumbersome during parking maneuvers.

]

The new model is touted as offering a radical (for minivans) limousine-like interior hush. I used a basic Extech sound level meter (407732) to measure the sound level on old and new minivans, both at the same EX-L trim level (see below for how the 2018 EX-L has “Acoustic Glass”):

	old	new
30 mph ramp	57 dBA	56 dBA
60 mph highway	64 dBA	63 dBA
70 mph highway	67 dBA	65 dBA

 

Note that road surface made a big difference. In the old car, before getting to the test track (a.k.a., Route 128), I drove over some super-smooth brand-new pavement. Interior noise dropped by 2-2.5 dBA. The new car seemed similarly dependent on road surface. [The Car and Driver review, linked below, has a buried test sheet with their test results. They actually measured a higher noise level for the Elite version of 67 dBA at 70 mph. But this could be due to meter or road surface differences. For comparison, C/D measured the Chrysler Pacifica minivan at 68 dBA, a Hyundai Sonata at 68 dBA, a $100,000 Mercedes S550 sedan at 66 dBA, a Chevy Bolt TV at 70 dBA, and the Tesla S 70D at 65 dBA. So, if we assume C/D’s numbers are consistent, the Odyssey Elite is actually slightly quieter than the big Mercedes (remember that A-weighting is not a perfect match for human perception, however).]

Let’s go to the brochure…

Dimensions are almost the same, based on Honda’s own specs, with the new minivan being about 0.5 inches narrower. Curb weight has been reduced 50 lbs., a significant achievement in a world where it is always tempting to add more. Cargo volume behind each of the seat rows is about the same, but curiously “passenger volume” has been reduced from 170 cubic feet to 160.

The old Odyssey had a boring 6-speed transmission and got an EPA combined 22 mpg. The new Odyssey has an amazing 9-speed or 10-speed transmission. This enables an amazing EPA combined… 22 mpg. You’ll have an opportunity to make more friends at the local gas station; Honda has reduced fuel tank capacity by 1.5 gallons to 19.5.

The stripper LX model lacks the electronic safety assists: Collision Mitigation Braking System (hits brakes when needed), Road Departure Mitigation System (steering wheel shaker and nudger), Forward Collision Warning (beeps), and Lane Departure Warning (beeps). The LX also lacks Lake Keeping Assist, Adaptive Cruise Control, Blind Spot Monitoring System, Auto High-Beams, and Cross Traffic Monitor (for backing out of a parking spot at the mall). Beep parking sensors come with the Touring and Elite trim levels only.

[I experimented a little with the blind spot monitors. Generally they seemed to fail when trying to merge onto an Interstate or change lanes, providing warnings only when a collision was imminent. Perhaps Honda is using the vendor who supplied the USS Fitzgerald destroyer?]

All of the trim levels except the LX include Remote Engine Start and an alarm system. If you’re concerned about global warming, the Elite model has ventilated front seats (all trim levels except LX include heated seats).

Honda quiets down the interior with Acoustic Glass for the windshield starting the EX-L trim level and then on the front/rear door windows on the Elite. The people who make acoustic glass show a reduction of 1-7 dB depending on the frequency, with the most reduction at around 3,000 Hz (follow this link and then click on “technical information” for a chart). The idea is laminating two sheets of glass with an “acoustic interlayer sheet” of plastic (vinyl?). In a world where Bernie Sanders supporters might start taking direct action against wealthy Odyssey Elite owners, you’ll be cheered to know that “Requires up to 10 minutes to penetrate the glazing, giving increased protection against theft, intrusion or carjacking.”

What about transporting modern-day children who can’t go more than 20 minutes without a snack? The built-in vacuum cleaner is only on the Touring and Elite models.

Honda still includes a physical MP3 player input jack(!). Every trim level includes at least one 2.5 amp USB charger (3 on the EX-L and above). The Elite also includes a wireless phone charger (Qi standard) on the center console. The Elite model includes a 550-watt 11-speaker sound system. Everything but the LX includes Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as well as digital radio both terrestrial (“HD Radio”) and satellite (SiriusXM). You can’t get the fancy features of the Touring and Elite models without paying for useless rear-seat TV (1024×600 resolution!) and navigation.

CarPlay and Android Auto work only with the phone physically plugged into a USB jack.

The Touring and Elite models have a 115V outlet in the front and three 12V outlets. The whole family can live out of this minivan in the event of a multi-day power outage.

It seems as though the EX model, $34,000, provides all of the safety and most of the utility. The Elite is nearly $47,000. So that’s $13,000 extra. Divide by 50,000 miles before the two converge in value? Assume an average speed of 30 mph in this traffic-clogged nation? That’s 1,667 hours of driving. So it costs $8/hour to be in the Elite versus the EX.

Donated most of your money to help the vulnerable, but you still want the interior peace and quiet of the latest Honda Odyssey with Acoustic Glass? Buy a 2011 Honda Odyssey (first year of the previous generation) and drive about 7 mph slower on the highway.

I’m going to try to find an LX or EX to test-drive and also an Elite and get some more noise measurements. The car seems to be selling well. The local dealer says that Elites come in “pre-sold”.

Summary: Some of the new magic safety features might be useful, but at least for a few months you’ll be a lot less safe in your new Odyssey as you struggle to learn all of the interfaces.

Related:

• review of the 2011 Odyssey
• discussion forum thread where I gave away a Dodge Caravan
• Car and Driver review of the Odyssey Elite

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The Times story that I thought was interesting for what it revealed about how Americans think with numbers seems to have struck a nerve.

Here’s a Facebook post by Jason Pontin, former editor of MIT’s alumni magazine, Technology Review:

It should go without saying (but obviously does not) that the behavior described in the article is unacceptable at every level. This is not the culture that technology needs if it’s to really serve humanity. Megan Smith has often told me, “You play the whole team” when you attack a really big problem. But a significant number of powerful men were harassing the team.

I responded with

If I ask people to contact me if they love Michael Bolton as much as I do, and 24 people from Silicon Valley respond that they enjoyed listening to “When a Man Loves a Woman” while relaxing with VC friends, will you be convinced that a significant number of the Silicon Valley “powerful” are huge Michael Bolton fans?

Owen Linderholm, whose LinkedIn describes him as a “Senior Content Strategist at WePay” and living in the Bay Area:

If 24 people were murdered by men in silicon valley would that be a significant enough number for you? It’s significant because what they did is significant not because it is statistically significant with a large enough p-value.

I took the bait:

The NYT article describes conduct going back to 2009. So that’s an 8-year period. There were certainly a lot more than 24 murders in Silicon Valley during those 8 years (just one year). … can we infer from these data that part of Silicon Valley “culture” is murder? You would probably try to figure out the population so that you could turn the total number into a rate and then you would compare the murder rate in these cities and towns to murder rates nationally.

Owen and then Jason:

You really are deliberately obtuse aren’t you. Were those murders by silicon valley luminaries?

I mean, some of these people are a). Very well known; b). Have spent the last decade piously positioning themselves as “allies” to women entrepreneurs and feminism in general.

My response:

Now you sound like the Women’s Studies major who is shocked to learn that one of the guys in her college dorm was feigning interest in feminism when really what interested him was her body.

There was another sub-thread spawned by Steve Atlas, linking to a Fortune article:

“You Won’t Believe How Many Women in Tech Say They’ve Faced Sexual Harassment”

Trae Vassallo took the stand during Ellen Pao‘s discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins … Afterwards, she says an “overwhelming number” of women approached her to share their own stories of harassment. … The survey includes just over 200 women—most of whom have at least 10 years of tech experience—sourced from Vassallo and Madansky’s networks. … A whopping 60% of the women who participated reported experiencing unwanted sexual advances.

[Actually, Vassallo and Pao’s stories suggest that Kleiner Perkins did not use sex as a basis for promotion. Vassallo’s testimony at the trial was that a Kleiner partner tried to have sex with her, but she refused. She was not promoted to “senior partner.” Pao testified at trial that the same Kleiner partner, who happened to be married, tried to have sex with her and she agreed. Pao also was not promoted to “senior partner.” So the two women (maybe inadvertently) participated in a controlled experiment.]

My response:

Here’s my survey. Me and this guy that I know surveyed 200 people from our networks. We discovered that 100 of them are FAA-certificated pilots, 70 of them with airplane ratings, 30 with helicopter ratings, 20 dual-rated, and 12 type-rated for at least one turbojet-powered aircraft. From this I infer that roughly 50 percent of Americans have FAA pilot certificates and that about 15 percent of Americans enjoy flying helicopters.

That Fortune would publish this article without the journalist or editor noticing the absurd methodological flaws that would be plain to a middle school student in Singapore explains why America needs H-1Bs. Just imagine how much money you could lose hiring anyone associated with this survey or the people who couldn’t see the flaws.

I then linked to a couple of articles about the Gates Foundation wasting $1.7 billion on “small high schools” due to incompetence with math/statistics:

• “How to Avoid Bill Gates’ Billion Dollar Mistake”
• “The Small Schools Myth”

Jason Pontin came back:

I’ve deleted the modifier “significant” but you’re fooling yourself if you think this isn’t a problem. You’re like those fools who think it matters that the police are as statistically likely to shoot an unarmed black man – when African Americans are stopped far more often. So, too, I’ve never talked with a female entrepreneur who doesn’t have a story like this.

So it all ties back to Black Lives Matter? I checked in with a neighbor who has raised about $50 million in the venture capital world (two startups plus a fund). It turned out that she had never been approached for sex by a VC, but that she had been approached for sex by her boss when working at a large bank (she said “no”). Of course, this is the Boston-area VC world so things might be different in Silicon Valley, but Pontin was Boston-based when editing Technology Review.

One Facebooker reasonably asked “So many women bail out of high tech. Why?”

Could the answer be “Most women were never dumb enough to be in high tech in the first place and the smart ones certainly wouldn’t be taking startup risk.”

At a party on Saturday night a graphic artist/designer for a Boston-area financial services firm described programming as “dull and unpleasant.” Her theory for why most of the coders at her employer were from India with “They need a population of more than 1 billion before they can find enough people who only care about money and don’t care how dull and unpleasant a job is.”

“We know Silicon Valley is broken, so let’s fix it” (CNBC) describes a couple of women as “industry leaders.” One is GM lifer Mary Barra, who never tried to raise VC money or work in high-tech. The other is Sheryl Sandberg, who never tried to raise VC money or work at a small high-tech company (Sandberg joined Google when it was already hugely successful and Facebook in 2008 when it was already worth at least $15 billion (October 2007 value)). [Separately, the article has a subhead of “Silicon Valley’s moral high ground belies its rampant problems with sexism.” Moral high ground? The journalist and editors are convinced by some anecdotes of “rampant problems with sexism” in an area where total employment is 1.5 million?]

A friend recently attended a wedding. The bride was marrying an already-rich guy. My friend and his wife shared a table with three Harvard MBA women. None of them were working. All had married already-rich guys. (See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for references to the effect of marriage and family law on women’s labor force participation, e.g., “only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time”.)

If Silicon Valley has truly developed a culture in which women regularly have sex with VCs in order to get funding or jobs (and the subset of the sisterhood that refuses to participate in this quid pro quo is therefore disadvantaged), why are we only hearing about it now? A friend’s private message:

this is the time for sexual beta-males to come out and pounce on alpha males in groups

Since I don’t live or work in Silicon Valley it is tough for me to offer an opinion on what the “culture” might be, other than people try to make money so that they can afford $5 million starter homes. But I remain fascinated that major newspapers and magazines, people whose job seemingly depends on being smart, and college-educated Americans all uncritically accept inferences made about a sizable industry (at least 23,000 startups in Silicon Valley as of 2016) based on 24 anecdotal reports where the journalists had to reach back through 8 years to gather enough material for one article.

Related:

• Silicon Valley’s latest whipping boy was passionate about women
• Fun with statistics, American-style

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“My experience with Dave McClure as a woman CEO” (Medium) is kind of interesting. Now that the hated Travis Kalanick has been expelled from Uber, this guy David McClure has been put forward by the New York Times as the new whipping boy:

Mr. McClure, a founder of 500 Startups and an investor, sent her a Facebook message that read in part, “I was getting confused figuring out whether to hire you or hit on you.”

Rashmi Sinha, co-founder of SlideShare, reports that

Dave recognized early on (perhaps even before I did) that many of the rejections were related to my being a woman CEO. … Dave McClure supported me through all this. He was outraged on my behalf and went out of his way to help. … Dave asked me many times to talk about my experience. He invited me to panels and ask me to share my experience. I spoke up some, but did not go into it in any depth.

This is admittedly a small sample (don’t want to be guilty of the same mistake as the New York Times and make broad conclusions from a small and biased sample!), but it seems interesting that a VC who was particularly interested in the gender ID of tech company management was also ultimately brought down in a gender-related complaint. (Most VCs, presumably, don’t care whether it is a man, woman, or green donkey holding a position, as long as money is being made.)

[Separately, Rashmi Sinha shows how we can perpetuate our culture of victimhood. She attributes investor concerns about her company and her as CEO to her gender ID and/or skin color:

Whenever I sensed that the VC across the table might not be receptive to a women, we would switch to my cofounder (& husband) Jon Boutelle taking the lead and making the presentation. The change in response was immediate — they were much more convinced by the story when it was told by a white man than myself.

The final straw was when a prominent VC firm, gave us an offer, as long as I stepped down as CEO. Needless to say, we said no to that one, and also stopped talking to anyone who seemed uncomfortable with my being a CEO.

Of course it is possible that her gender ID played a role. But it is equally possible that husband Jon was a more convincing person. A glance at LinkedIn profiles shows that husband Jon had years of experience as a software engineer and therefore much more of a shared background with a typical VC than someone who studied “Cognitive Neuropsyhology” [sic]. Sinha’s LinkedIn profile shows that she had no background as a CEO. Maybe that is why potential investors wanted to bring in someone else? (This is commonly done with white male founders who lack significant management experience.)

So we can have a never-ending culture of victimhood in the U.S. as long as each of us attributes all of our challenges and failures to bias!]

Forbes says that McClure is married with two children. What was the plan going to be when one of these women accepted his proposition, became pregnant, demanded child support under California family law, and started talking to the wife?

McClure does seem to have been on the correct side of history, at least from the perspective of my Facebook friends. Back in 2014 he started a “500 Women fund that is focused on firms with at least one female founder.” (source) Fortune shows him in September 2016 raising money for Hillary (“He’s with Her”). In response to thoughtful and intelligent questions from a dispassionate female moderator, he went off on a tangent about how much he hates Donald Trump.

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Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is available is available in an English translation. The transition of wealthy economies from a market economy (“Capitalism”) to a welfare state (“Socialism”) has apparently pretty painless for most citizens. Nearly half of the U.S. economy is now centrally-planned or taxpayer-funded and people pay their property tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, payroll tax, Medicare tax, income tax, etc. without complaining too much.

Alexievich interviewed people in former Soviet republics, including Russia, to find out what it was like to go in the other direction: from Socialism to a free-market Capitalism that demands much more of citizens than the U.S. or Western Europe.

Everything below is a quote from someone she interviewed:

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves. I remember it well: After we finished school, we’d volunteer to go on class trips to the Virgin Lands, and we’d look down on the students who didn’t want to come.

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries… Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption.

My wife and I graduated from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Petersburg (back then, it was Leningrad) State University, then she got a job as a janitor, and I was a stoker in a boiler plant. You’d work one twenty-four-hour shift and then get two days off. Back then, an engineer made 130 rubles a month, while in the boiler room, I was getting 90, which is to say that if you were willing to give up 40 rubles a month, you could buy yourself absolute freedom. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked. We thought that we were coming up with new ideas.

There were new rules: If you have money, you count—no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease.

There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…

Before, I had hated money, I didn’t know what it was. My family never talked about it—it was considered shameful. We grew up in a country where money essentially did not exist. Like everyone else, I would get my 120 rubles a month and that had been enough. … Back then, books replaced life… This was the end of our nightly kitchen vigils and the beginning of making money then making more money on the side. Money became synonymous with freedom. Everyone was completely preoccupied with it. The strongest and most aggressive started doing business. We forgot all about Lenin and Stalin. And that’s what saved us from another civil war with Reds on the one side and Whites on the other. Friends and foes. Instead of blood, there was all this new stuff… Life! We chose the beautiful life. No one wanted to die beautifully anymore, everyone wanted to live beautifully instead. The only problem was that there wasn’t really enough to go around…

The Soviet was a very good person, capable of traveling beyond the Urals, into the furthest deserts, all for the sake of ideals, not dollars. We weren’t after somebody else’s green bills. The Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, the Siege of Stalingrad, the first man in space—that was all us. The mighty sovok! I still take pleasure in writing “USSR.” That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I’m living on foreign soil.

Socialism isn’t just labor camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world: Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules. Instead of grabbing everything you can, you feel for others. They say to me that you couldn’t buy a car—so then no one had a car. No one wore Versace suits or bought houses in Miami. My God! The leaders of the USSR lived like mid-level businessmen, they were nothing like today’s oligarchs. Not one bit! They weren’t building themselves yachts with champagne showers. Can you imagine! Right now, there’s a commercial on TV for copper bathtubs that cost as much as a two-bedroom apartment. Could you explain to me exactly who they’re for? Gilded doorknobs… Is this freedom? The little man, the nobody, is a zero—you’ll find him at the very bottom of the barrel.

A cult of money and success. The strong, with their iron biceps, are the ones who survive. But not everyone is capable of stopping at nothing to tear a piece of the pie out of somebody else’s mouth. For some, it’s simply not in their nature. Others even find it disgusting.

Did I believe in communism? I’ll be honest with you, I’m not going to lie: I believed in the possibility of life being governed fairly. And today… as I’ve already told you… I still believe in that. I’m sick of hearing about how bad life was under socialism. I’m proud of the Soviet era! It wasn’t “the good life,” but it was regular life. We had love and friendship… dresses and shoes… People hungrily listened to writers and actors, which they don’t do anymore.

Everywhere you look, you see our new heroes: bankers and businessmen, models and prostitutes… managers… The young can adapt, while the old die in silence behind closed doors. They die in poverty, all but forgotten. My pension is fifty dollars a month…[ She laughs.] I’ve read that Gorbachev’s is also fifty dollars a month… They say that the Communists “lived in mansions and ate black caviar by the spoonful. They built communism for themselves.” My God! I’ve shown you around my “mansion”—a regular two-bedroom apartment, fifty-seven square meters. I haven’t hidden anything from you: my Soviet crystal, my Soviet gold…

The first thing to go was friendship… Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn’t need money at all… that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills—these were no Soviet rubles, they weren’t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants… We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this. We’d read a boatload of romantic books, but life kicked and shoved us in another direction.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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What do Millennials think of the U.S. family law system? How would it run if they were in charge? Professor Jennifer Harman, of Colorado State University, answered this question with some of her research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

Harman introduced her research by pointing out that “decisions in family court are largely discretionary,” consistent with what attorneys interviewed for Real World Divorce told us, i.e., judges tend to rule based on their personal biases and beliefs.

Harman randomly assigned undergraduates to the position of judging custody and alimony disputes via a browser-based survey. One of her goals was to see if people would be punished for “gender stereotype violations,” e.g., being a stay-at-home father or a “breadwinner” mother: “We have strong stereotypes about fathers being better breadwinners and mothers being better at parenting.” As is typical for American college students today, the majority of the subjects in her experiment were women (75/25 ratio).

Harman said that some of the most fascinating results were in the expressed rationales from the mock judges. “I am huge on gender equality.” one girl wrote, and then assigned primary custody and a cashflow to the mother, just as a judge would have done in the 1950s. Stay-at-home dads could not get a fair hearing in front of these 20-year-olds. When a mother had no income, she was the logical primary parent because she would be getting monthly checks from the father. When a father had no income, “he doesn’t earn enough to take care of the children,” so custody was once again assigned to the mother.

The college students disfavored men when it came to alimony: “John should make his own living now. He’s divorced.” versus “She needs five years [of cash from the former husband] to get back on her feet.”

The young would-be judges, especially those whose parents were divorced, favored shared parenting: “if they hadn’t had shared parenting, they wanted it. Most wished they had had more time with both parents,” said Harman. “While kids from nuclear families didn’t get it as much.”

Related:

• Colorado family law

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Submission by Michel Houellebecq imagines France’s transition to Islamic law and, therefore, legal polygamy (the U.S. has already transitioned, de facto if not de jure!). He starts off describing the legacy Western model:

Mostly I had mistresses—or rather, as people said then (and maybe still do), I had girlfriends, roughly one a year. … They would start at the beginning of the school year, with a seminar, an exchange of class notes, or what have you—one of the many social occasions, so common in student life, that disappear when we enter the workforce, plunging most of us into a solitude as stupefying as it is radical. … When we came back from summer vacation and the school year began again, the relationship would end, almost always at the girl’s initiative. Things had changed over the summer. This was the reason they’d give, usually without elaboration. A few, clearly less eager to spare me, would explain that they had met someone. Yeah, and so? Wasn’t I someone, too? … The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, vacations) that were not only sexual, but social. Yet there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships—in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step toward one’s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and definitive, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.

I had made only very occasional forays onto escort sites, usually during the summer months as a sort of stopgap between one student and the next.

The complete idiocy of this model became plain to me only much later—rather recently, in fact—when I happened to see Aurélie and then, a few weeks later, Sandra. (But if it had been Chloé or Violaine, I’m convinced I would have reached the same conclusion.) The moment I walked into the Basque restaurant where Aurélie was meeting me for dinner, I knew I was in for a grim evening. Despite the two bottles of white Irouléguy that I drank almost entirely by myself, I found it harder and harder, and after a while almost impossible, to keep up a reasonable level of friendly conversation. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, it suddenly seemed tactless, almost unthinkable, to talk about the old days. As for the present, it was clear that Aurélie had never managed to form a long-term relationship, that casual sex filled her with growing disgust, that her personal life was headed for complete and utter disaster. There were various signs that she’d tried to settle down, at least once, and had never recovered from her failure. The sourness and bitterness with which she talked about her male colleagues (in the end we’d been reduced to discussing her professional life: she was head of communications for an association of Bordeaux winemakers, so she traveled a lot to promote French wines, mainly in Asia) made it painfully clear that she had been through the wringer. Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up “for a nightcap.” She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the elevator doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen. I didn’t even want to see her naked, I’d rather have avoided it, and yet it came to pass, and only confirmed what I’d already imagined. Her emotions may have been through the wringer, but her body had been damaged beyond repair. Her buttocks and breasts were no more than sacks of emaciated flesh, shrunken, flabby, and pendulous. She could no longer—she could never again—be considered an object of desire. My meal with Sandra followed a similar pattern, albeit with small variations (seafood restaurant, job with a pharmaceutical CEO), and it ended much the same way, except it seemed to me that Sandra, who was plumper and jollier than Aurélie, hadn’t let herself go to the same degree. She was sad, very sad, and I knew her sorrow would overwhelm her in the end; like Aurélie, she was nothing but a bird in an oil slick; but she had retained, if I can put it this way, a superior ability to flap her wings. In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions, her imperfectly extinguished sensuality would lead her to seek out the company of young men, she would become what we used to call a cougar, and no doubt she’d go on this way for several years, ten at the most, before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive, and condemned her to a lasting solitude.

Don’t read this book if you’re enthusiastic about settling down in the suburbs:

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

I thought about Annelise’s life—and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her case. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her a while to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted (Bruno was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner—he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known—had to have known—that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.

Bruno and Annelise must be divorced by now. That’s how it goes nowadays. A century ago, in Huysmans’s time, they would have stayed together, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so unhappy after all.

Don’t read this book if you’re depressed about aging:

my body was the seat of various painful afflictions—headaches, rashes, toothaches, hemorrhoids—that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace—and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean.

Houellebecq’s novel predicts the outcome of the 2017 elections:

The National Front was way ahead, with 34.1 percent of the vote.

(Marine Le Pen actually won 33.9 percent.) He added that the Muslim Brotherhood was running as well (and ultimately prevails in forming a government). He also described the potential for voters to fail to obey instructions from the elites:

the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to a situation that was chaotic, violent, and unpredictable.

French Christians are excluded from the country’s educational system:

It was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris–Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris–Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork. I reread the letter three times in disbelief. It was, practically to the euro, what I’d have gotten if I had retired at sixty-five, at the end of a full career. They really were willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media, under rubrics such as “tribune” or “points of view”; nowadays these had become a private club. Even if all the university teachers in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn’t found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

But they react by converting to Islam. At which point dating and marriage procedures change…

“What about the girls?” [a former Christian colleague] grinned. “Obviously, that’s all changed. I guess you could say things are organized differently now. I got married,” he added, rather brusquely. Then he elaborated: “To one of my students.” “They arranged that for you, too?” “Not exactly. Let’s just say they don’t discourage the possibilities of contact with female students. I’m getting another wife next month.” With that he headed off toward the rue de Mirbel, leaving me openmouthed at the top of the stairs.

I’d been waiting two or three minutes when a door opened to my left and in walked a teenage girl wearing low-waisted jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt, her long black hair loose over her shoulders. When she saw me, she shrieked, tried awkwardly to cover her face with her hands, and dashed back out of the room. At that very moment, Rediger appeared on the landing and came down the stairs to greet me. He had witnessed the incident, and shook my hand with a look of resignation. “That’s Aïcha, my new wife. She’ll be very embarrassed that you saw her without her veil.” “I’m so sorry.” “No, don’t apologize. It’s her fault. She should have asked whether there was a guest before she came into the front hall. She doesn’t know her way around the house yet, but she will.” “Yes, she looks very young.” “She just turned fifteen.”

At that moment the door opened, just in time to save me from having to answer. It was a plump woman, perhaps forty years old, with a kind face, carrying a tray of warm canapés arranged around an ice bucket. This held the promised bottle of Meursault. “That’s my first wife, Malika,” he said once she’d left. “You seem to be meeting all my wives today. I married her when I was still living in Belgium … Yes, my family’s Belgian. So am I, for that matter. I was never naturalized, though I’ve lived here for twenty years.”

“Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha—unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it’s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really,

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At the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017, researchers noted that at least some of what drove custody litigation was differences in what people believed was the norm: “What do sisters, brothers, and friends say?” Marriages that mixed partners from different social classes tended to result in the most intense litigation: “People from lower social class families are more accustomed to single moms. So if you have a mom who was herself raised by a white trash single mom and a dad who grew up middle class raised by two parents, they’re never going to agree on whether shared parenting is good for the kids.”

Related:

• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life

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Submission is an impressive achievement because the protagonist is a literature professor and the author says, in the acknowledgments at the end, that he was never either a graduate student or a professor.

Here are a few samples:

Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up another subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne. The next morning (or maybe that evening, I don’t remember: I spent the night of my defense alone and very drunk) I realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me. So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotized by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, by the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product-addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that “tireless Proteus,” money itself). Above all they’re hypnotized by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanized as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, movie stars, and models.

I was poor, and if I’d been given one of those polls that are always trying to “take the pulse of the under-25s,” I would certainly have checked the box marked “struggling.” And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first feeling was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

all he’d written was a vague dissertation on Rimbaud, a bogus topic if ever there was one, … Millions of dissertations were written on Rimbaud, in every university in France, the francophone countries, and beyond. Rimbaud was the world’s most beaten-to-death subject, with the possible exception of Flaubert, so all a person had to do was look for two or three old dissertations from provincial universities and basically mix them together. Who could check? No one had the resources or the desire to sift through hundreds of millions of turgid, overwritten pages on the voyant by a bunch of academic drones.

My interest in the life of the mind had greatly diminished; my social life was hardly more satisfying than the life of my body; it, too, presented itself as a series of petty annoyances—clogged sink, slow Wi-Fi, points on my license, dishonest cleaning woman, mistakes in my tax return—and these, too, followed one after another without interruption, and almost never left me in peace.

More: Submission

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As a former teacher of a section of an applied probability class at MIT and a recent tutor for AP Statistics, here are my favorite recent news stories…

“Facebook says high-frequency posters often share fake news” (Engadget):

Adam Mosseri, the Facebook VP in charge of News Feed, said that the company’s research shows that people who post more than 50 times per day are often sharing low quality content.

“Harassed, Propositioned and Silenced in Silicon Valley” (nytimes front page headline; the story itself carries “Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment”)

More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent days about being sexually harassed. … The women’s experiences help explain why the venture capital and start-up ecosystem — which underpins the tech industry and has spawned companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon — has been so lopsided in terms of gender.

[What’s the denominator for those 24 women who complained to the Times? This report shows total Silicon Valley employment at 1.5 million jobs in 2015. The EEOC says that 36 percent of “high tech workers” in 2014 were women (Google says that 31 percent of its employees in 2016 identified as “women”). If all Silicon Valley jobs were in tech, that would be roughly 500,000 women, so the denominator is at most 500,000 but almost certainly smaller due to the fact that not all jobs in SV are tech jobs.]

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Our youngest is almost two years old, so it is time for him to get a passport. He needs to catch up to Lani Shea, who had visited 100 countries by age 2 years, 8 months (Wikipedia entry on Travelers’ Century Club; also this BBC article on Lani’s dad). First stop: Niagara Falls! (Can we see everything that matters to toddlers in one day? Do we actually need to go to the Canadian side? Or if we ride Maid of the Mist will we get a good enough view of the Canadian falls to avoid La Migra?)

The State Department passport application form provides only two options for “Sex”: “male” and “female”. This is true both for the applicant and the applicant’s (not to say “his or her”) parents. Could this be Rex Tillerson’s fault? (see “Proof that being straight and gay are not treated the same in the world of business“) Or do we blame Donald Trump?

Separately, I looked for places where we could go and submit the application (both parents, lots of IDs, etc.) and our local post office showed up at the top of the list. Thursday is the walk-in day for passports. But you can’t go during the lunch break. “Lunch Start” is at 10:00 and “Lunch End” is at 14:00. (There are only three establishments in our town that serve lunch commercially. The farthest from the post office is a 1-minute walk.)

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