What’s remarkable is that Japan lead the opposition to the ban, even though by overfishing bluefin, they’re engaged in a sort of minor cultural suicide.  No one will lose out more than the Japanese if bluefin are no longer available.

Even more confusing, Go’s footprint in the US was extremely small in 1949. Not even many highbrow individuals would have played it, even if they’d heard of it.

You know that Munday is Sundayes brother
Tuesday is such another
Wednesday you must go to Church and pray
Thursday is half-holiday
On Friday it is too late to begin to spin
The Saturday is half-holiday agen.

That’s by Merlin Mann some moralist, writing in 1639, which I found in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” the E.P. Thompson paper that Julian recommended. Thompson soon offers as an aside:

The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students — today, and provokes the question whether it is not a “natural” human work-rhythm.)

I am so glad to hear that.

I found the article via the Atlantic’s new ideas blog, which is being written by Conor Friedersdorf–more about which later.

Update: In a comment to this post, my friend Julian suggests a very nice piece of academic history on changing conceptions of time and work for those who want to read more.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to” (Updike, quoted in the NYT)

Once you’ve recognized the tremendous ways in which you can be influenced by situational factors–this case is just a much more literal instance of external pressure–there’s an ethical obligation to resist them.  But it’s not simple to recognize the way in which crowds work, and acting based on that knowledge is not easy, even for individuals who are otherwise virtuous.

If Wal-Mart had taken more care, no one’s character would be any different, but a man’s life would have been saved.  That’s the bottom line, and it resiss simple moralization.

When Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy was advertised as How to Argue Logically, sales jumped from a few thousand to thirty thousand per year; when Whistler’s Ten O’Clock was renamed What Art Should Mean to You, sales quadrupled. Haldeman-Julius had learned this technique from his days as a newspaper headline writer, and he made no apologies about his retitling strategy. “The Henry Ford of Literature” (H/t Kevin)

This great life had its secrets: how many times had Milosz told us in his poems that he was an “evil person”? His friends never believed it, though I think he wanted us maybe not to accept it as true it but at least to consider it more seriously. Friends are usually too well-meaning, too polite, too well-bred. They always tell you “you’ll be fine,” “you exaggerate”; they want to cheer you up—that’s their business.  (Source)