gold rush open air & guido birthday party, jardin des r�collets, 8/5/06

Our Insane Farm Policy

You have heard this before, but as Orwell put it, "we have now sunk to a depth where the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."

There are few issues for which the political consensus is so distant from both common sense and expert opinion. Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation from said recipients understand that Americans are spending billions to prop up the last of the horse-and-buggy industries.

At this nation's founding, nearly nine out of 10 workers were employed in agriculture. By 1900 that fell to fewer than four in 10. Today, fewer than one in every 100 workers is in agriculture, and less than 1% of gross domestic product is attributable to agriculture. Yet this country spends billions upon billions of dollars subsidizing a system that makes almost everyone in the world worse off....

Subsidies combined with trade barriers (another term for subsidy) prop up the price of food for consumers at home and hurt farmers abroad. This is repugnant because agriculture is a keystone industry for developing nations and a luxury for developed ones. This keeps Third World nations impoverished, economically dependent and politically unstable. Our farm subsidies alone � forget trade barriers � cost developing countries $24 billion every year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. Letting poor nations prosper would be worth a lot more than the equivalent amount in foreign aid.

From Jonah Goldberg at the LA Times.

la perle, 08/04/06

inspired by face hunter

I've just discovered some people using my pictures as source of inspiration...
like the Brasilian illustrator Fernanda Guedes:




or the French stylist Joan Carassus:

Perhaps the Worst Advice Ever

Daniel Drezner recounts some truly terrible advice he received as a young academic:

When I was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, a senior colleague once told me his secret to academic success: One bad article equals five great ones. His point was that the worst thing a scholar can do is to publish too much, as opposed to too little. Any substandard publication creates a black mark that is difficult to erase.

This sounds like a smug senior professor aiming to paralyze a junior colleague's creativity.

The truth is that producing bad papers is one of the costs of producing good papers. When you swing for a home run, you are more likely to strike out. The only way to avoid the occasional strike out is to quit the game.

Here is my advice to a young academic: You will be judged by your five to ten best papers. Your bad papers will be mostly forgotten. So be willing take risks, if there is a reasonable chance of a big payoff.

quiet paris in the morning, avenue marceau, 08/03/06

slate.com: "the face hunter is the only one to sexualize its subjects."

I've forgotten to talk about one of the first serious articles about "street style" - published 2 weeks ago: "Street fashion blogs keep tabs on the world's most stylish pedestrians." by Justin Shubow. Serious... even there are some funny details about my work. It's said that I "sexualize my subjects" and I "put decadent scenesters on display". Do I really take dirty pictures?