“Raise the Crime Rate.”

Your must-read of the day.

(via marathonpacks)

See also: The New Yorker’s “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik:

Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

[…] Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

Or, you could like, listen closer and think. It’s not that hard. I like Klosterman, but no music writer is ever anywhere near good when s/he tries to parse why others like an artist without doing the actual messy ethnographic work, or (much worse) to be a sportswriter/political wonk and predict an artist’s legacy. (via marathonpacks)

I have no idea how I am supposed to take a piece seriously when it contains the sentence, “I’m not really in a position to argue for (or against) the merits of tUnE-yArDs, simply because I’ve barely listened to w h o k i l l.”

(via thirtydollarproject)

He’s doing it to establish a ‘non-partisan’ air so his ‘friendly advice’ seems more sincere I guess.

(I think TBH an experienced music critic should be able to get quite a lot out of something on first listen and maybe articulate it usefully. I don’t think that’s what Klosterman’s doing.)

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What’s so lame about this piece is that it’s Klosterman’s way of doing for music crit what cable TV pundit-hacks do for political commentary: substituting poll-number commentary for actual critique of ideas, substituting inane speculation for informed opinion. It’s clearly one of those quota-filling posts that he coughed out in a couple hours.

(via marathonpacks)

Yaassss!!! Join me! Disliking Klosterman gets lonely. We even have similar tastes, but the way he writies about things makes me question what I like. (Edited to add my special Chuck Klosterman tag)

(via lastbutnotleast)

There are people who like Klosterman?  (Never forget.)