A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by Paulos John Allen

Author:Paulos, John Allen [Paulos, John Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465050673
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

*In a classic Ponzi operation, the few early investors are paid off with the contributions of many later investors, who, in turn, are paid off by the contributions of still later ones, until the scheme collapses.

Section 3

LIFESTYLE, SPIN, AND SOFT NEWS

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.

–JORGE LUIS BORGES

Concern with self, reference to self, and promotion of self are much more common in popular culture and the media than ever before. And not just on daytime TV. According to a 1991 Gallup Poll, most of the 70 percent of Americans who look through a newspaper on any given day read the soft lifestyle, gossip, and daily magazine sections of the paper. Furthermore, this preoccupation with self transcends the lifestyle sections; spin control, public relations, and a concern with the media and celebrity play a role in every domain from business to international affairs. Not even natural disaster stories are immune; during the recent Los Angeles earthquakes there were headlines like QUAKE DOESN’T SPARE STARS’ HOMES. Wouldn’t the real story have been an earthquake that did skip over the houses of the rich and famous?

And newspaper op-eds, by their very nature, necessitate some reference to self. Exactly how much was answered by The Nation, which ran a story in January 1994 that ranked twenty-two New York Times and Washington Post op-ed and political columnists according to their use of the words I, me, and myself. Richard Cohen led the pack, averaging 13.4 self-mentions per column; he was followed by Meg Greenfield, with 8.4. Ellen Goodman, Anna Quindlen, David Broder, and William Safire weighed in at, respectively, 4.1, 3.7, 1.7, and 16. Mary McGrory scored only a .8, and George Will was self-effacement champ with .2. Can one brag about this distinction? Intrigued by these rankings, I had my word processor count the number of times I had used those self-referential words in various segments of this book; the result was approximately 1.6 times per 700 words, the length of the average column. Of course, there are problems with such a simple criterion, but I’ll leave those to the reader.

Looked at from a mathematical perspective, this concentration on self and the complexity it engenders bring to mind a number of notions in logic and computer science. The issues discussed in this section include celebrity profiles, presidential primary handicapping, societal obsessions, spin-doctoring and the reporter’s role in stories, compressibility of news accounts, and the paradoxes and ironies that lie just below the surface of some articles. (Recall the pollster who asked, “To what do you attribute the ignorance and apathy of the American voting public?” and was answered, “Don’t know and don’t care.”) I also discuss the notion of a person’s or a group’s “complexity horizon” and the many aspects of modern life that are so intricately tangled and convolutedly complicated as to be beyond that horizon. Finally and perhaps fittingly, I include in this section on self another personal interlude in which I average more I’s and me’s than Richard Cohen.

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