Adam Victor Brandizzi

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

Not long after that, I got a better assignment: answering the phone for Michael Porter, a professor at the Harvard Business School. I was an assistant to his assistant. In 1985, Porter had published a book called “Competitive Advantage,” in which he elaborated on the three strategies—cost leadership, differentiation, and focus—that he’d described in his 1980 book, “Competitive Strategy.” I almost never saw Porter, and, when I did, he was dashing, affably, out the door, suitcase in hand. My job was to field inquiries from companies that wanted to book him for speaking engagements. “The Competitive Advantage of Nations” appeared in 1990. Porter’s ideas about business strategy reached executives all over the world.

Porter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he argued that, very often, it isn’t because their executives made bad decisions but because they made good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades. (The “innovator’s dilemma” is that “doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”) As Christensen saw it, the problem was the velocity of history, and it wasn’t so much a problem as a missed opportunity, like a plane that takes off without you, except that you didn’t even know there was a plane, and had wandered onto the airfield, which you thought was a meadow, and the plane ran you over during takeoff. Manufacturers of mainframe computers made good decisions about making and selling mainframe computers and devising important refinements to them in their R. & D. departments—“sustaining innovations,” Christensen called them—but, busy pleasing their mainframe customers, one tinker at a time, they missed what an entirely untapped customer wanted, personal computers, the market for which was created by what Christensen called “disruptive innovation”: the selling of a cheaper, poorer-quality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.

Ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted. There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: “The degree is in disruption,” the university announced. “Disrupt or be disrupted,” the venture capitalist Josh Linkner warns in a new book, “The Road to Reinvention,” in which he argues that “fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest,” along with “dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,” mean that the time has come to panic as you’ve never panicked before. Larry Downes and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier stage: “big bang disruption.” “This isn’t disruptive innovation,” they warn. “It’s devastating innovation.”

Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead. Christensen has co-written books urging disruptive innovation in higher education (“The Innovative University”), public schools (“Disrupting Class”), and health care (“The Innovator’s Prescription”). His acolytes and imitators, including no small number of hucksters, have called for the disruption of more or less everything else. If the company you work for has a chief innovation officer, it’s because of the long arm of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” If your city’s public-school district has adopted an Innovation Agenda, which has disrupted the education of every kid in the city, you live in the shadow of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” If you saw the episode of the HBO sitcom “Silicon Valley” in which the characters attend a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 (which is a real thing), and a guy from the stage, a Paul Rudd look-alike, shouts, “Let me hear it, DISSS-RUPPTTT!,” you have heard the voice of Clay Christensen, echoing across the valley.

Last month, days after the Times’ publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., fired Jill Abramson, the paper’s executive editor, the Times’ 2014 Innovation Report was leaked. It includes graphs inspired by Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma,” along with a lengthy, glowing summary of the book’s key arguments. The report explains, “Disruption is a predictable pattern across many industries in which fledgling companies use new technology to offer cheaper and inferior alternatives to products sold by established players (think Toyota taking on Detroit decades ago). Today, a pack of news startups are hoping to ‘disrupt’ our industry by attacking the strongest incumbent—The New York Times.”

A pack of attacking startups sounds something like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but, generally, the rhetoric of disruption—a language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder—calls on the rhetoric of another kind of conflict, in which an upstart refuses to play by the established rules of engagement, and blows things up. Don’t think of Toyota taking on Detroit. Startups are ruthless and leaderless and unrestrained, and they seem so tiny and powerless, until you realize, but only after it’s too late, that they’re devastatingly dangerous: Bang! Ka-boom! Think of it this way: the Times is a nation-state; BuzzFeed is stateless. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they started something new—historicism, the idea “that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” Things began looking up. First, there was that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.

Most big ideas have loud critics. Not disruption. Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming. Replacing “progress” with “innovation” skirts the question of whether a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our devices are getting newer and newer.

The word “innovate”—to make new—used to have chiefly negative connotations: it signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French Revolution a “revolt of innovation”; Federalists declared themselves to be “enemies to innovation.” George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these words: “Beware of innovation in politics.” Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in 1828, “It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.”

The redemption of innovation began in 1939, when the economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of economics and business. (In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about “creative destruction”; Christensen, retrofitting, believes that Schumpeter was really describing disruptive innovation.) “Innovation” began to seep beyond specialized literatures in the nineteen-nineties, and gained ubiquity only after 9/11. One measure: between 2011 and 2014, Time, the Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Forbes, and even Better Homes and Gardens published special “innovation” issues—the modern equivalents of what, a century ago, were known as “sketches of men of progress.”

The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.

Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” consists of a set of handpicked case studies, beginning with the disk-drive industry, which was the subject of Christensen’s doctoral thesis, in 1992. “Nowhere in the history of business has there been an industry like disk drives,” Christensen writes, which makes it a very odd choice for an investigation designed to create a model for understanding other industries. The first hard-disk drive, which weighed more than a ton, was invented at I.B.M., in 1955, by a team that included Alan Shugart. Christensen is chiefly concerned with an era, beginning in the late nineteen-seventies, when disk drives decreased in size from fourteen inches to eight, then from eight to 5.25, from 5.25 to 3.5, and from 3.5 to 2.5 and 1.8. He counts a hundred and sixteen new technologies, and classes a hundred and eleven as sustaining innovations and five as disruptive innovations. Each of these five, he says, introduced “smaller disk drives that were slower and had lower capacity than those used in the mainstream market,” and each company that adopted them was an entrant firm that toppled an established firm. In 1973, Alan Shugart founded Shugart Associates, which introduced a 5.25-inch floppy-disk drive in 1976; the company was bought by Xerox the next year. In 1978, Shugart Associates developed an eight-inch hard-disk drive; Christensen, who is uninterested in the floppy-disk-drive industry, classes the company as an entrant firm and credits it with disrupting established firms that manufactured fourteen-inch hard drives. In 1979, Alan Shugart founded Shugart Technology, which changed its name to Seagate Technology after Xerox threatened to sue. In 1980, Seagate Technology introduced the first 5.25-inch hard-disk drive; Christensen, at this point, classes Seagate as an entrant firm, and Shugart Associates as a failed incumbent, even though Shugart Associates was shifting its focus to what was then its very profitable floppy-disk-drive business. In the mid-eighties, Seagate—here considered by Christensen to be an established firm—delayed manufacturing 3.5-inch drives, which were valued by producers of portable computers and laptops, because its biggest customer, I.B.M., didn’t want them; I.B.M. wanted a better and faster version of the 5.25-inch drive for its full-sized desktop computers. Seagate didn’t start shipping 3.5-inch drives until 1988, and by then, Christensen argues, it was too late.

In his original research, Christensen established the cutoff for measuring a company’s success or failure as 1989 and explained that “ ‘successful firms’ were arbitrarily defined as those which achieved more than fifty million dollars in revenues in constant 1987 dollars in any single year between 1977 and 1989—even if they subsequently withdrew from the market.” Much of the theory of disruptive innovation rests on this arbitrary definition of success.

In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars. Last year, Seagate shipped its two-billionth disk drive. Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant disrupters, on the other hand, no longer exist, their success having been in some cases brief and in others illusory. (The fleeting nature of their success is, of course, perfectly consistent with his model.) Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed. MiniScribe, founded in 1980, started out selling 5.25-inch drives and saw quick success. “That was MiniScribe’s hour of glory,” the company’s founder later said. “We had our hour of infamy shortly after that.” In 1989, MiniScribe was investigated for fraud and soon collapsed; a report charged that the company’s practices included fabricated financial reports and “shipping bricks and scrap parts disguised as disk drives.”

As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties. (In some instances, what shifted was their ownership: I.B.M. sold its hard-disk division to Hitachi, which later sold its division to Western Digital.) In the longer term, victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements, whether or not they were the first to market the disruptive new format. Companies that were quick to release a new product but not skilled at tinkering have tended to flame out.

Other cases in “The Innovator’s Dilemma” are equally murky. In his account of the mechanical-excavator industry, Christensen argues that established companies that built cable-operated excavators were slow to recognize the importance of the hydraulic excavator, which was developed in the late nineteen-forties. “Almost the entire population of mechanical shovel manufacturers was wiped out by a disruptive technology—hydraulics—that the leaders’ customers and their economic structure had caused them initially to ignore,” he argues. Christensen counts thirty established companies in the nineteen-fifties and says that, by the nineteen-seventies, only four had survived the entrance into the industry of thirteen disruptive newcomers, including Caterpillar, O. & K., Demag, and Hitachi. But, in fact, many of Christensen’s “new entrants” had been making cable-operated shovels for years. O. & K., founded in 1876, had been making them since 1908; Demag had been building excavators since 1925, when it bought a company that built steam shovels; Hitachi, founded in 1910, sold cable-operated shovels before the Second World War. Manufacturers that were genuinely new to excavation equipment tended to sell a lot of hydraulic excavators, if they had a strong distribution network, and then not do so well. And some established companies disrupted by hydraulics didn’t do half as badly as Christensen suggests. Bucyrus is the old-line shovel-maker he writes about most. It got its start in Ohio, in 1880, built most of the excavators that dug the Panama Canal, and became Bucyrus-Erie in 1927, when it bought the Erie Steam Shovel Company. It acquired a hydraulics-equipment firm in 1948, but, Christensen writes, “faced precisely the same problem in marketing its hydraulic backhoe as Seagate had faced with its 3.5-inch drives.”

Unable to persuade its established consumers to buy a hydraulic excavator, Bucyrus introduced a hybrid product, called the Hydrohoe, in 1951—a merely sustaining innovation. Christensen says that Bucyrus “logged record profits until 1966—the point at which the disruptive hydraulics technology had squarely intersected with customers’ needs,” and then began to decline. “This is typical of industries facing a disruptive technology,” he explains. “The leading firms in the established technology remain financially strong until the disruptive technology is, in fact, in the midst of their mainstream market.”

But, actually, between 1962 and 1979 Bucyrus’s sales grew sevenfold and its profits grew twenty-five-fold. Was that so bad? In the nineteen-eighties, Bucyrus suffered. The whole construction-equipment industry did: it was devastated by recession, inflation, the oil crisis, a drop in home building, and the slowing of highway construction. (Caterpillar sustained heavy losses, too.) In the early nineteen-nineties, after a disastrous leveraged buyout handled by Goldman Sachs, Bucyrus entered Chapter 11 protection, but it made some sizable acquisitions when it emerged, as Bucyrus International, and was a leading maker of mining equipment, just as it had been a century earlier. Was it a failure? Caterpillar didn’t think so when, in 2011, it bought the firm for nearly nine billion dollars.

Christensen’s sources are often dubious and his logic questionable. His single citation for his investigation of the “disruptive transition from mechanical to electronic motor controls,” in which he identifies the Allen-Bradley Company as triumphing over four rivals, is a book called “The Bradley Legacy,” an account published by a foundation established by the company’s founders. This is akin to calling an actor the greatest talent in a generation after interviewing his publicist. “Use theory to help guide data collection,” Christensen advises.

He finds further evidence of his theory in the disruption of the department store by the discount store. “Just as in disk drives and excavators,” he writes, “a few of the leading traditional retailers—notably S. S. Kresge, F. W. Woolworth, and Dayton Hudson—saw the disruptive approach coming and invested early.” In 1962, Kresge (which traces its origins to 1897) opened Kmart; Dayton-Hudson (1902) opened Target; and Woolworth (1879) opened Woolco. Kresge and Dayton-Hudson ran their discount stores as independent organizations; Woolworth ran its discount store in-house. Kmart and Target succeeded; Woolco failed. Christensen presents this story as yet more evidence of an axiom derived from the disk-drive industry: “two models for how to make money cannot peacefully coexist within a single organization.” In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Kmart closed more than two hundred stores, a fact that Christensen does not include in his account of the industry’s history. (Kmart filed for bankruptcy in 2002.) Only in a footnote does he make a vague allusion to Kmart’s troubles—“when this book was being written, Kmart was a crippled company”—and then he dismisses this piece of counter-evidence by fiat: “Kmart’s present competitive struggles are unrelated to Kresge’s strategy in meeting the original disruptive threat of discounting.”

In his discussion of the steel industry, in which he argues that established companies were disrupted by the technology of minimilling (melting down scrap metal to make cheaper, lower-quality sheet metal), Christensen writes that U.S. Steel, founded in 1901, lowered the cost of steel production from “nine labor-hours per ton of steel produced in 1980 to just under three hours per ton in 1991,” which he attributes to the company’s “ferociously attacking the size of its workforce, paring it from more than 93,000 in 1980 to fewer than 23,000 in 1991,” in order to point out that even this accomplishment could not stop the coming disruption. Christensen tends to ignore factors that don’t support his theory. Factors having effects on both production and profitability that Christensen does not mention are that, between 1986 and 1987, twenty-two thousand workers at U.S. Steel did not go to work, as part of a labor action, and that U.S. Steel’s workers are unionized and have been for generations, while minimill manufacturers, with their newer workforces, are generally non-union. Christensen’s logic here seems to be that the industry’s labor arrangements can have played no role in U.S. Steel’s struggles—and are not even worth mentioning—because U.S. Steel’s struggles must be a function of its having failed to build minimills. U.S. Steel’s struggles have been and remain grave, but its failure is by no means a matter of historical record. Today, the largest U.S. producer of steel is—U.S. Steel.

The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive. On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent. In 2007, Christensen told Business Week that “the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone,” adding, “History speaks pretty loudly on that.” In its first five years, the iPhone generated a hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue. In the preface to the 2011 edition of “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Christensen reports that, since the book’s publication, in 1997, “the theory of disruption continues to yield predictions that are quite accurate.” This is less because people have used his model to make accurate predictions about things that haven’t happened yet than because disruption has been sold as advice, and because much that happened between 1997 and 2011 looks, in retrospect, disruptive. Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only after the fact. History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what you want it to say. The popular incarnation of the theory tends to disavow history altogether. “Predicting the future based on the past is like betting on a football team simply because it won the Super Bowl a decade ago,” Josh Linkner writes in “The Road to Reinvention.” His first principle: “Let go of the past.” It has nothing to tell you. But, unless you already believe in disruption, many of the successes that have been labelled disruptive innovation look like something else, and many of the failures that are often seen to have resulted from failing to embrace disruptive innovation look like bad management.

Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an established company doesn’t disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it didn’t disrupt. When a startup fails, that’s a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark of disruptive innovation. (“Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it,” the organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, that’s only because it hasn’t yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence of disruption.

The handpicked case study, which is Christensen’s method, is a notoriously weak foundation on which to build a theory. But, if the handpicked case study is the approved approach, it would seem that efforts at embracing disruptive innovation are often fatal. Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering and construction firm, got its start in 1905 and helped build more than a hundred and fifty dams all over the world, including the Hoover. Beginning in 1988, a new C.E.O., William Agee, looked to new products and new markets, and, after Bill Clinton’s election, in 1992, bet on mass transit, turning to the construction of both commuter and long-distance train cars through two subsidiaries, MK Transit and MK Rail. These disruptive businesses proved to be a disaster. Morrison-Knudsen announced in 1995 that it had lost three hundred and fifty million dollars, by which point the company had essentially collapsed—not because it didn’t disruptively innovate but because it did. Time, Inc., founded in 1922, auto-disrupted, too. In 1994, the company launched Pathfinder, an early new-media venture, an umbrella Web site for its magazines, at a cost estimated to have exceeded a hundred million dollars; the site was abandoned in 1999. Had Pathfinder been successful, it would have been greeted, retrospectively, as evidence of disruptive innovation. Instead, as one of its producers put it, “it’s like it never existed.”

In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, the financial-services industry innovated by selling products like subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and mortgage-backed securities, some to a previously untapped customer base. At the time, Ed Clark was the C.E.O. of Canada’s TD Bank, which traces its roots to 1855. Clark, who earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard with a dissertation on public investment in Tanzania, forswore Canada’s version of this disruptive innovation, asset-backed commercial paper. The decision made TD Bank one of the strongest banks in the world. Between 2002 and 2012, TD Bank’s assets increased from $278 billion to $806 billion. Since 2005, TD Bank has opened thirteen hundred branches in the United States, bought Commerce Bank for $8.5 billion, in 2008, and adopted the motto “America’s Most Convenient Bank.” With the money it earned by expanding its traditional banking services—almost four billion dollars a year during the height of the financial crisis, according to the Canadian business reporter Howard Green—it set about marketing itself as the bank with the longest hours, the best teller services, and free dog biscuits.

When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial crisis. Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didn’t dim the fervor for disruption; instead, it fuelled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the panic on which the theory of disruption thrives.

Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

In “The Innovative University,” written with Henry J. Eyring, who used to work at the Monitor Group, a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter, Christensen subjected Harvard, a college founded by seventeenth-century theocrats, to his case-study analysis. “Studying the university’s history,” Christensen and Eyring wrote, “will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success.” On the basis of this research, Christensen and Eyring’s recommendations for the disruption of the modern university include a “mix of face-to-face and online learning.” The publication of “The Innovative University,” in 2011, contributed to a frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, at colleges and universities across the country, including a collaboration between Harvard and M.I.T., which was announced in May of 2012. Shortly afterward, the University of Virginia’s panicked board of trustees attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institution’s future by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed; the vice-chair of the board forwarded to the chair a Times column written by David Brooks, “The Campus Tsunami,” in which he cited Christensen.

Christensen and Eyring’s recommendation of a “mix of face-to-face and online learning” was drawn from an investigation that involves a wildly misguided attempt to apply standards of instruction in the twenty-first century to standards of instruction in the seventeenth. One table in the book, titled “Harvard’s Initial DNA, 1636-1707,” looks like this:

Initial Traits	Implications
Small, face-to-face classes	High faculty-student intimacy
	Low instructional efficiency
Classical, religious instruction	High moral content in the curriculum
	Narrow curriculum with low practicality for non-pastors
Nonspecialized faculty	Dogmatic instruction
	High faculty empathy for learners
	Low faculty expertise

In 2014, there were twenty-one thousand students at Harvard. In 1640, there were thirteen. The first year classes were held, Harvard students and their “nonspecialized faculty” (one young schoolmaster, Nathaniel Eaton), enjoying “small, face-to-face classes” (Eaton’s wife, who fed the students, was accused of putting “goat’s dung in their hasty pudding”) with “high faculty empathy for learners” (Eaton conducted thrashings with a stick of walnut said to have been “big enough to have killed a horse”), could have paddled together in a single canoe. That doesn’t mean good arguments can’t be made for online education. But there’s nothing factually persuasive in this account of its historical urgency and even inevitability, which relies on a method well outside anything resembling plausible historical analysis.

Christensen and Eyring also urge universities to establish “heavyweight innovation teams”: Christensen thinks that R. & D. departments housed within a business and accountable to its executives are structurally unable to innovate disruptively—they are preoccupied with pleasing existing customers through incremental improvement. Christensen argues, for instance, that if Digital Equipment Corporation, which was doing very well making minicomputers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, had founded, in the eighties, a separate company at another location to develop the personal computer, it might have triumphed. The logic of disruptive innovation is the logic of the startup: establish a team of innovators, set a whiteboard under a blue sky, and never ask them to make a profit, because there needs to be a wall of separation between the people whose job is to come up with the best, smartest, and most creative and important ideas and the people whose job is to make money by selling stuff. Interestingly, a similar principle has existed, for more than a century, in the press. The “heavyweight innovation team”? That’s what journalists used to call the “newsroom.”

It’s readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the “public interest.” That’s why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church and state.) “The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times well for decades,” according to the Times’ Innovation Report, “allowing one side to focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers,” as if this had been, all along, simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned, according to the report, because it has “hidden costs” that thwart innovation. Earlier this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy. Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, “Reader Experience,” which can be measured, following Upworthy, in “Attention Minutes.” Vox Media, a digital-media disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times’ strongest competitors (few of which are profitable), called the report “brilliant,” “shockingly good,” and an “insanely clear” explanation of disruption, but expressed the view that there’s no way the Times will implement its recommendations, because “what the report doesn’t mention is the sobering conclusion of Christensen’s research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage to handle them gracefully.”

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It’s not more than that. It doesn’t explain change. It’s not a law of nature. It’s an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it’s the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it’s blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

The upstarts who work at startups don’t often stay at any one place for very long. (Three out of four startups fail. More than nine out of ten never earn a return.) They work a year here, a few months there—zany hours everywhere. They wear jeans and sneakers and ride scooters and share offices and sprawl on couches like Great Danes. Their coffee machines look like dollhouse-size factories.

They are told that they should be reckless and ruthless. Their investors, if they’re like Josh Linkner, tell them that the world is a terrifying place, moving at a devastating pace. “Today I run a venture capital firm and back the next generation of innovators who are, as I was throughout my earlier career, dead-focused on eating your lunch,” Linkner writes. His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds, Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Don’t look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be disrupted.

But they do pause and they do look back, and they wonder. Meanwhile, they tweet, they post, they tumble in and out of love, they ponder. They send one another sly messages, touching the screens of sleek, soundless machines with a worshipful tenderness. They swap novels: David Foster Wallace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith. “Steppenwolf” is still available in print, five dollars cheaper as an e-book. He’s a wolf, he’s a man. The rest is unreadable. So, as ever, is the future. ♦

Enviado por Míriam Leitão e Alvaro Gribel - |

Estilhaços argentinos

Os erros que a Argentina cometeu foram para segundo plano. O pior agora é o erro da Suprema Corte americana em relação aos argentinos. Uma sombra a mais de incerteza cobrirá todos os processos de reestruturação de dívida no mundo. E eles acontecem em qualquer país, como se viu recentemente na Europa. A Justiça americana está incentivando o conflito oportunista.

No calote de 2005, a Argentina, de forma agressiva, impôs aos credores uma perda de 70% do valor dos papéis. E o ex-presidente Néstor Kirchner fez de tudo uma bravata populista. Esse foi o erro deles. Na época, 93% dos credores aceitaram o acordo, porque era aquilo ou nada, mas 7% não aceitaram. Desses 7%, apenas 10% venderam, em 2008, os papéis para fundos especialistas em brigas na Justiça, ou seja, 0,7% do total da dívida.

Os fundos que a presidente Cristina Kirchner chama de abutres vêm litigando na Justiça americana e agora ganharam o aval da Suprema Corte. Depois da negociação de 2010, a Argentina começou a pagar aos credores. Depositaria em 30 de junho uma parcela de US$ 900 milhões, mas a ordem judicial é para que esse dinheiro seja arrestado para pagar aqueles 10% de credores dos 7% que não fizeram acordo. E eles têm a receber US$ 1,3 bilhão.

A Argentina está encurralada, porque, se não pagar, estará em nova moratória; se pagar, o dinheiro não irá para os credores que de boa fé aceitaram o acordo, mas para os mais espertos dos especuladores. Se pagar os US$ 2,2 bilhões, tendo apenas US$ 26 bi de reservas, abre a possibilidade de os demais, que não entraram no acordo, exigirem o mesmo. Os que entraram na negociação também podem pedir o mesmo tratamento e isso desmontaria todo o edifício.

O governo de Buenos Aires oscilou nos últimos dias, mas ontem admitiu que foi à Justiça americana procurando o juiz que deu a primeira sentença e pediu condições de pagar. Pela primeira vez, aceita pagar aos fundos abutres. Internamente, estava dizendo que não pagaria.

A ideia de tentar fugir da jurisdição americana, que a presidente Kirchner imaginou inicialmente, era impraticável. Ela não conseguiria até o dia 30 levar 100% dos credores que fecharam o acordo para uma nova troca de títulos dentro das leis argentinas.

O que preocupa todo mundo, do governo brasileiro ao Fundo Monetário Internacional, é o fato de que essa decisão da Suprema Corte abre um precedente com reflexo em qualquer processo de renegociação de dívida que ocorra daqui em diante. É sempre traumático e complexo. Agora piorou porque os credores foram incentivados a ficarem de fora dos processos para brigar na Justiça, com a esperança de um dia receberem o valor integral de papéis que perderam valor nas crises soberanas.

O Brasil viveu uma crise angustiante na década de 1980 e 1990 com a dívida contraída pelos militares. O embaixador Jório Dauster pediu, em comentário postado no blog, que eu registrasse aqui que ele é que tirou o país da moratória, ao negociar os IDUs (juros devidos e não pagos) de US$ 8 bilhões. Foi o ex-ministro Pedro Malan, no entanto, quem fez o grande trabalho da negociação da troca da dívida velha caloteada por novos papéis e encerrou a moratória brasileira.

O nosso processo foi bem sucedido, porque não partiu de bravata, mas sim de uma negociação com oferta de opções aos credores. A Argentina escolheu o confronto e se deu mal. O maior temor agora é que o resultado final aumente a incerteza em relação a qualquer problema de país devedor daqui em diante. Até a França, que sedia o Clube de Paris, onde dívidas soberanas são renegociadas, entrou na Corte ao lado da Argentina.

Dear people who complain:

There was never a golden age in American politics. If you despair at how depressing our politics are, recall that in 1800 John Adams and Thomas Jefferson engaged in some of the nastiest PR campaigns against each other. Elections are about power, bringing the best and worst out of everyone who wants power, regardless of their motivation for wanting it.

While it is true that a singular nasty example doesn’t define the past, or the present, politics in a democracy is inherently frustrating. A government by and for the people includes your stupid neighbor, your weird cousin, the person with the religious beliefs you find absurd, everyone you stare at on the bus (or who stares at you), the people who own the company you work for and the ones begging for change on your way there. There is no way for a government by and for the people to function without frustrating most of the people in it in one way or another. It’s really a miracle it works at all and for as long as it has. Power changes hands in this country with surprising frequency and civilized grace, and for all its horrors and disappointments it is still a wonder to behold.

A common refrain heard during election season is “voting is picking the lesser of two evils”, a dig at the disappointing quality of our candidates. Whenever I’ve asked someone who says this if they would run for office of any kind, they’ve consistently said “no way”. We know how undesirable life as a politician is,  yet simultaneously we’re surprised by the low quality of the candidates we have. They are directly related to each other. We are not promised good candidates in the Constitution. Most of us invest little energy towards the process of picking candidates, understanding how they’re chosen or even helping decide the winners in races:  58% of American’s voted in 2008. And that was just a vote, which takes only minutes: who knows how much time they invested in considering their choices. Complaints and apathy are dangerous bedfellows and we suffer both in droves.

I believe, more or less, we get the government we deserve. Paying close attention twice a decade isn’t paying much attention at all. Only when things get bad enough that we’re watching our representatives, senators, mayors and governors regularly, and participating at levels of government where our vote carries much more weight, is the kind of change each of us wants both deserved and possible.

Nothing is learned by throwing wrenches at an already broken machine. It’s only by getting inside and dirtying your hands, or at least studying the insides to see how the machinery is designed to work, and where it’s failing, that empty frustrations can be replaced by meaningful action. No matter how small those actions are, they have infinite more value to everyone than throwing bigger wrenches at bigger broken machines.

Churchill wrote:

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others.

Also see my essay on How to Pick a President.

Literature tells us that our desires know no reason. We read Racine’s Phaedra or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and we see people captured by passion, acting in defiance of all sense or explanation. But science is never satisfied with ineluctable mystery, even in the realm of desire. During the past four decades, researchers into human behaviour have begun to investigate sexual desire. More than anything, they want to know: why is it that we want who we want?

Evolutionary psychology offers one compelling answer to this question. It tells us that, for all its complexity, human desire is the result of something quite simple: our struggle to stay alive. Lust, infatuation, true love – these are all just mechanisms we have acquired in order to reproduce and to keep our children alive. Meaning that, when we look for sex, we are actually, unbeknown even to ourselves, acting in ways that are highly strategic and rational. We are using adaptive techniques that humans developed over our species’ long history, in order to maximise their genes’ chances for survival.

In the four decades since it was first developed, this strategic theory of desire has become a dominant paradigm in psychology, and a familiar feature of media discussions of sexual behaviour. But the strategic paradigm is now facing a challenge from a new generation of evolutionary theorists who have put forth a new story about our species’ past, and new predictions about how we might have sex in the future.

I’ve never had a beard. It would take me forever to grow one, and I haven’t had any reason to try. When I was young, women hated beards. Facial hair was seen as a 1970s thing – something your dad or Burt Reynolds might wear. Then, one day, there were hipsters and, within a few short years, magazines were filled with bearded models, and razor-makers were in a panic over falling sales.

The New York Daily News concluded in an August 2013 article that ‘the country’s recent fondness for the full beard goes back less than two years to a small number of trend setters’. But the article made no mention of a study on beards and desire published earlier that year in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. The study’s authors, Barnaby Dixson and Robert Brooks of the University of New South Wales in Australia, showed a series of photos, depicting men with different kinds of facial hair to a group of women, and asked them to rank the photos in terms of attractiveness. The women said they liked beards, but not, according to the authors, because beards are in fashion. Rather, the weak preferences of the study’s participants were taken to show that women have been programmed by evolution to pursue men with facial hair. Beards apparently signal age, maturity, industriousness, aggression, dominance, and ambition – all traits than women are innately attracted to.

In reaching its conclusions, the study applied what has become the standard paradigm in evolutionary psychology. This paradigm says that our real-world sexual choices tend to reflect biological imperatives that have, over the course of millions of years, programmed men and women to approach sex very differently. For women, pregnancy is a difficult, costly process, and raising children even more so, meaning that sex must be taken seriously. By and large, biology conditions women to avoid casual sex and to connect sex with love. It also pushes them to look for good providers who tend to be older and wealthier.

Humans have adapted to a wide variety of ecological niches, and part of that could be due to our sexual plasticity

Men, on the other hand, have lots of love to give at no cost to themselves, and they behave in ways that will spread their genes as widely as possible. On this theory, men will settle down with a woman who is fertile and whose fidelity is assured, in order to have legitimate offspring. But they will also sleep around as much as they can, especially with women who possess the key ‘fertility cues’ of youth and physical beauty.

Someone who reads only the media coverage might wonder why anyone takes the evolutionary study of sex (ESS) seriously. It is easy to caricature, and many of its followers seem intent on doing the job themselves. In the past couple of years, evolutionary psychologists have been able to grab reporters’ attention by suggesting, for instance, that men with smaller testicles make better fathers, that men with attractive partners perform oral sex more often because they’re checking for competitors’ sperm, and that women have orgasms in order to attract mates willing to commit to raising offspring. Stories such as these have given plenty of ammunition to critics of ESS and, as a result, many people now dismiss it out of hand. And that’s a shame, because the discipline has stimulated some genuinely original thinking about human sexual behaviour. A closer look at its history can give a sense of its sophistication.

The roots of evolutionary psychology can be traced back to Charles Darwin himself, who says in On the Origin of Species (1859) that, armed with the theory of natural selection, ‘psychology will be based on a new foundation’. But it truly came into its own in the 1970s, thanks to Robert Trivers, then a Harvard postgraduate, who wrote a series of papers that helped to define evolutionary psychology as a field. One of these, ‘Parental Investment and Sexual Selection’ (1972), laid out the basic elements of an evolutionary explanation for sexual behaviour. Trivers looked at data from a variety of animal species, and concluded: ‘The relative parental investment of the sexes in their young is the key variable controlling the operation of sexual selection. Where one sex in­vests considerably more than the other, members of the latter will compete among themselves to mate with members of the former.’

Trivers’s paper looked only glancingly at human behaviour, though it was rich in suggestions for further research. In his book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), the anthropologist Donald Symons used Trivers’s basic ideas to explain how people make sexual choices. Symons wanted to know what women and men were after when they went looking for sex, and he arrived at a relatively simple answer: ‘Men like sex with strangers ... and women generally don’t.’

There is nothing maladaptive about a woman having a casual affair. It’s a great way to get access to strong, healthy genes

Symons was a powerful theoriser, but he had been unable to offer much in the way of actual data. In 1981, an ambitious young Harvard professor, David Buss, read Symons’s book, and decided to look for hard evidence to test its key claims. Though he started with a survey of a few middle-class white people, he was not content, as many of his followers would later be, to stop there. He assembled a group of international collaborators into what he called the International Mate Selection Project, which asked people from 37 different cultures what they looked for in a sexual partner. His collaborators risked their lives to survey Zulu women in remote South African villages and to smuggle information, carefully coded to avoid government censors, out of Communist China. The results, first published in 1990, provided data from close to 10,000 respondents in 33 countries and they revealed some strikingly consistent patterns across a variety of cultures, all more or less in line with Symons’s predictions. Buss used this data as the basis for what he called ‘sexual strategies theory’.

Though the data from Buss’s surveys confirmed the basic hypotheses of Trivers and Symons, the resulting theory introduced some important refinements. Notably, sexual strategies theory pays attention to an obvious fact that earlier evolutionary psychologists had left largely unanalysed: women sometimes want casual flings, too. According to sexual strategies theory, women don’t altogether avoid sex outside of committed relationships, but they use different criteria for choosing partners depending on whether they are engaged in short-term or long-term mating. Women out for casual sex generally place a premium on looks, which signal fertility and genetic health, in contrast to those looking for a long-term partner, who look for someone with status, maturity, and access to resources. There is nothing maladaptive about a woman having a casual affair. It’s a great way to get access to strong, healthy genes, and ones that are different from those of her other children, thereby increasing the family’s overall resistance to disease. She just has to be sly about it, so she can still hold on to her life partner.

Critics of evolutionary psychology have long accused it of crafting theories that work not as predictive hypotheses, but as ‘just so stories’. Such stories take observed behaviour as they find it, and simply speculate about how it might have bestowed some adaptive advantage on early humans. But this charge, when levelled at sexual strategies theory, is unfair, for in the hands of researchers such as Buss, the theory does make predictions – for example, that women will be more likely to pursue hyper-masculine men when they are ovulating than at other times. These hypotheses can then be subjected to confirmation or refutation through data drawn from any cultural context. Indeed, proponents of sexual strategies theory often point out that their chief critics, the ‘social constructionists’ who insist that our sexual behaviour is entirely the result of our cultural conditioning, have a ‘just so’ problem of their own.

Nevertheless, it’s certainly true that even the most robust cross-cultural data cannot show that a given phenomenon is the result of our mental hardwiring. And ambitious cross-cultural studies of the sort that Buss and his colleagues undertook are exceedingly rare. Indeed, an embarrassing portion of the ESS literature is based on surveys of university undergraduates: hardly a reliable sample population for uncovering universal human characteristics. Not only do these people come from a single culture, they come from a narrow subsection of that culture, one that is mostly white, liberal, educated and affluent. College students also operate in an unusual social context, where they are surrounded by large numbers of single people their age, all of them equipped with means of instantaneous communication and social networking, and without any supervision by parents or other familiar elders. As one recent paper put it, these conditions ‘may not have existed during the majority of human evolution’.

Evolutionary psychology has also been criticised for its focus on heterosexual desire. To be fair, natural selection operates by means of reproduction, and so reproductive sex is clearly going to play a crucial role in any explanation of its mechanisms. But humans are not an exclusively heterosexual species, and an adequate theory of desire must explain how people can be oriented, either partly or exclusively, towards members of their own sex. ESS has most commonly seen same-sex desire as a by-product of our evolved, heterosexual mating strategies. On this view, it is the result of traits – such as our tendency to build same-gender alliances in order to solidify our social position – that are adaptive in their origins, but that have, in certain individuals, become distorted or overdeveloped. This account describes homosexuality as a kind of software glitch – one that evolution hasn’t bothered to fix because it isn’t serious enough to crash the entire programme. But not many gays and lesbians are likely to be satisfied with that explanation, and they could be forgiven for wondering whether the problem lies with the paradigm itself.

Among the Na, monogamy is frowned upon, everyone is free to have as much casual sex as he or she wants, and jealousy is apparently unheard of

One could argue that traditional ESS looks at the question of sexual orientation exactly backwards. When we survey the full range of sexual practices across different human societies, we might conclude that the sort of rigid, predictable patterns of desire posited by sexual strategies theory are either nonexistent or maladaptive. Humans have had to adapt to a wide variety of ecological niches, and we have done so with remarkable success, and part of that could be due to our sexual plasticity, which allows us to calibrate our sexual behaviour to fit our environment. Same-sex and bisexual desire are two very visible products of our innate variability but, as the ethnographic record shows, there are many others that fit equally poorly into the standard paradigm.

Two US anthropologists, Katherine Starkweather and Raymond Hames, have recently shown that polyandry, the practice of women taking multiple husbands, is much more common than people in their discipline previously recognised. And Stephen Beckerman at Pennsylvania State University has drawn attention to what he calls ‘partible paternity’, where a woman has sex with more than one man in order to get pregnant, with these multiple partners jointly recognised as fathers of the offspring. This practice is common throughout the lowlands of South America, and other examples can be found around the world. And some cultures, such as the Na (or Mosuo) people in southwest China, don’t seem to have any stable pair bonds at all. Among the Na, monogamy is frowned upon, everyone is free to have as much casual sex as he or she wants, and jealousy is apparently unheard of.

All this shows that we are a weird, wonderful and sometimes downright kinky species. But sexual strategies theorists have never pretended that their model can explain all of our sexual behaviour. Their claim is rather that they can give us a way to distinguish signal from noise. Beneath all of our diversity, the thinking goes, there are certain forms of behaviour, such as stable heterosexual pair bonding, that might not be universal, but which recur with sufficient regularity as to be considered the norm. However, as historians and anthropologists continue to add to the catalogue of anomalies, we need to decide what sort of evidence counts as falsifying the theory. How common does a behaviour need to be before we consider it a norm?

Right now, there is no rival grand theory that promises to explain fully what we might call the ‘variability hypothesis’ – the view that humans are capable of adapting most or all aspects of their sexual behaviour to fit their historical and environmental context. On its own, an appeal to our innate plasticity does no predictive work. A full, predictive theory of variability should tell us, for instance, which sorts of environments produce stable heterosexual monogamy, and which lead to alternative arrangements, such as polyandry or, as in ancient Greece, widespread bisexuality. Until we have such a theory, the variability hypothesis leaves us with yet another dreaded ‘just so’ story. But research on sexual variability is still at an early stage, and we can hope that such a theory will yet emerge. If and when it does, we can pit it directly against sexual strategies theory, and see which of them does a better job explaining the evidence overall.

Even if evolutionary psychologists come up with the perfect theory to link our sexual behaviour to the hardwiring in our brain, many people would argue that it wouldn’t matter much anyway. We would still wake up every morning to be buffeted by desire’s mysterious winds, and we would still be left to cobble together, from our unruly urges and our imperfect decisions, lives that make as much sense to us as possible. Tracing your sexual preferences back to the Pleistocene doesn’t help you decide between the rough boy in the leather jacket and the nice banker who will help with the kids. And yet, when all is said and done, we’re animals – and evolution is the most powerful tool we have for understanding the animal world. Biologists would not try to explain the development of our kidneys or our immune systems without reference to human evolution. And it would be very odd if evolutionary theory had nothing to contribute to the understanding of the human mind.

So we all have an interest in figuring out what will make us sexually happy. Humans in the 21st century, at least those in developed, Western democracies, live in an environment that provides almost complete sexual liberty. And thanks to technology, we can now connect with one another with unprecedented ease. We can see more potential mates in an hour on Tinder than our Pliocene ancestors encountered in their lifetimes. Assuming that we are hard-wired sexually, ignoring that hardwiring will come at a cost. Modern consumers have unlimited freedom when it comes to food. But if they use that freedom the wrong way, they could make themselves obese, and potentially die of a heart attack.

If jealousy is truly hard-wired, then experiments with non-monogamy are doomed to fail

Though evolutionary psychology is often seen as a conservative discipline, dedicated to providing justifications of the status quo, its final conclusions could be quite radical indeed. Researchers might tell us that it’s the accepted norms of our culture that are doing violence to our nature. Indeed, the current best-seller among ESS books, Sex at Dawn (2010) by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, two self-described ‘shame exorcists’, is a sustained attack on our society’s norm of monogamy. It surveys the anthropological record, as well as the behaviour of our closest primate cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos, and makes the case that humans actually evolved to be promiscuous. Ryan and Jethá claim that it is only with the advent of modern agriculture, and men’s ensuing need to protect their inheritance, that humans began to expect exclusivity from their partners. They attribute our modern sexual malaise to the mismatch between our Paleolithic libidos and the monogamous straitjacket into which we have forced ourselves.

Sex at Dawn is longer on polemic than it is on data and argument, and the reviews in the specialist journals have generally been negative. But the book has provoked its readers to look again at our culture’s norms surrounding monogamy. Gay men such as the US sex columnist Dan Savage have always found straight society’s obsession with sexual exclusivity somewhat bizarre, considering that people of every orientation experience it as a difficult struggle. And here evolutionary science might genuinely have something to say. If jealousy is truly hard-wired, as sexual strategy theorists claim, then experiments with non-monogamy and what Savage calls ‘monogamishness’ are perhaps doomed to fail. But if jealousy is instead the product of a contingent set of historical circumstances, it might be that our norms need to go.

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume told us long ago that you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Two centuries earlier, Montaigne called the art of composing our character our ‘great and glorious masterpiece’, and science can never spare us the burden of this task. Regardless of what evolutionary psychologists decide about our nature, it’s still up to us to choose the lives we want. Yet when it comes to sex, we don’t seem to be especially good at it, which is why so many of us are confused and unhappy. On the bright side, however, we are also in the midst of a massive social transformation that is giving us more sexual freedom than we have ever had before. If evolutionary theory can help us to navigate this dizzying new world, we ought to be willing to listen. After all, we need all the help we can get.

18 June 2014

The story of the British intelligence agent who rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, drew new borders—and gave us today’s ungovernable country.

Enviado por Míriam Leitão e Alvaro Gribel - |

Coluna no GLOBO

O preço argentino

Quando o presidente Néstor Kirchner disse que não pagaria a dívida, a Argentina simplesmente não tinha como pagar. Quando ele impôs aos credores um desconto de 70% da dívida e fez um discurso agressivo aos credores, ele queria fazer política. Houve quem, no Brasil, elogiasse o caminho deles. Melhor foi o nosso, e os últimos dois dias mostraram isso.

O Brasil também não pôde pagar, nos anos 80, a dívida externa deixada pelo governo militar. O então presidente José Sarney quis fazer disso um ato político, para ter apoio popular. Fracassou. A dívida foi renegociada num penoso processo que começou com o embaixador Jório Dauster. Os credores recusaram a primeira proposta. O economista Pedro Malan fez a negociação que deu certo, depois de três anos de muita luta para negociar com os credores as várias opções de desconto.

No Brasil, houve muito elogio à formula draconiana imposta por Néstor Kirchner aos credores. Hoje se vê o quanto isso foi equivocado. Primeiro, porque a Argentina ficou anos fora do mercado internacional. E agora, quando se prepara para normalizar a relação com os credores, é apanhada por uma decisão da Suprema Corte americana, que mandou pagar aos fundos que não entraram na negociação.

A Suprema Corte dos EUA não tem razão. Esses fundos não são os credores originais. Eles compraram por uma fração do valor de face apenas para especulação e por isso são chamados de fundos abutres. O problema é que o melhor teria sido negociar com os credores um merecido desconto e voltar de forma pacífica ao mercado internacional. Ao criar um clima de tensão, como fez o falecido presidente, ele preparou o que a Argentina acabou colhendo agora.

O país está num córner. Se cumprir a decisão, os outros credores podem acabar suspendendo o desconto que tiveram que aceitar. Aí eles cobrariam o que têm a receber pelo valor de face. A Argentina não tem condições de pagar. Suas magérrimas reservas seriam insuficientes. E, mesmo se apenas tiver que pagar o que os fundos que ficaram fora da negociação cobram, já terá dificuldades cambiais.

Para o Brasil, o principal problema está na balança comercial. Os argentinos são o nosso terceiro principal parceiro — atrás apenas de China e Estados Unidos — e menos dólares no país pode significar restrição nas importações. A corrente de comércio entre os dois já sofreu um baque de 10% desde 2011, quando começou a ficar mais evidente a crise cambial entre os argentinos. Ela caiu de US$ 39,6 bilhões, naquele ano, para US$ 36 bilhões, no ano passado. O risco é que as relações comerciais diminuam ainda mais. O setor industrial brasileiro será o mais afetado porque 90% da nossa exportação para a Argentina são produtos manufaturados, principalmente veículos automotores e autopeças.

O Brasil também teve problemas com os credores que ficaram de fora da negociação. De forma engenhosa, usando o Banco do Brasil, que era também um credor do país, os negociadores conseguiram impedir que esse grupo, que não aceitou a negociação, pudesse paralisá-la. Depois, enfrentou um longo processo com a família Dart, que havia comprado títulos exatamente para tentar o mesmo golpe de exigir o pagamento integral. O Brasil venceu a briga na Justiça com a ajuda de um amigo inesperado. O governo americano entrou como amicus curiae do lado do Brasil. A Corte decidiu a nosso favor, conforme contei em “Saga Brasileira”.

Nesses casos, adianta pouco a bravata. Há uma dívida e deve ser paga; se os juros se acumularam de forma injusta, negocia-se. Foi o que o Brasil fez. A Argentina dos Kirchner preferiu dar à dívida um tratamento populista e acabou encurralada.

When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground.

I don’t know what cascading chemical awesomeness is going down in my brain when it detects and rewards me for the act of building, but I’m certain that the hormonal cocktail is the end result of millions of years of evolution. Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.

And we’re slowly and deviously being trained to forget this.

A Day Full of Moments

Look around. If you’re in a group of people, count how many are lost in their digital devices as they sit there with a friend. If you’re in your office, count how many well-intentioned distractions are within arm’s reach and asking for your attention. I wonder how many of you will read this piece in one sitting – it’s only 844 words long.

The world built by the Internet is one of convenience. Buy anything without leaving your house. All knowledge is nearby and that’s a lot of knowledge, but don’t worry, everyone is pre-chewing it for you and sharing it in every way possible. They’re sharing that and other interesting moments all day and you’re beginning to believe that these shared moments are close to disposable because you are flooded with them.

You’re fucking swimming in everyone else’s moments, likes, and tweets and during these moments of consumption you are coming to believe that their brief interestingness to others makes it somehow relevant to you and worth your time.

The fact that the frequency of these interesting moments appears to be ever-growing and increasingly easy to find does not change the fact that your attention is finite. Each one you experience, each one you consume, is a moment of your life that you’ve spent forever.

These are other people’s moments.

These moments can be important. They can connect us to others; they briefly inform us as to the state of the world; they often hint at an important idea without actually explaining it by teasing us with the impression of knowledge. But they are often interesting, empty intellectual calories. They are sweet, addictive, and easy to find in our exploding digital world, and their omnipresence in my life and the lives of those around me has me starting this year asking, “Why am I spending so much time consuming other people’s moments?”

This is not a reminder to over-analyze each moment and make them count. This is a reminder not to let a digital world full of others’ moments deceive you into devaluing your own. Their moments are infinite – yours are finite and precious – and this New Year I’m wondering how much we want to create versus consume.

The Builders High

What’s the last thing you built when you got that high? You know that high I’m talking about? It’s staring at a thing that you brought into the world because you decided it needed to exist.

For me, the act of writing creates the builder’s high. Most pieces are 1000+ words. They involve three to five hours of writing, during which I’ll both hate and love the emerging piece. This is followed by another hour of editing and tweaking before I’ll publish the piece, and the high is always the same. I hit publish and I grin. That smile is my brain chemically reminding me, Hey, you just added something new to the world.

Is there a Facebook update that compares to building a thing? No, but I’d argue that 82 Facebook updates, 312 tweets, and all those delicious Instagram updates are giving you the same chemical impression that you’ve accomplished something of value. Whether it’s all the consumption or the sense of feeling busy, these micro-highs will never equal the high when you’ve actually built.

Blank Slates

This New Year, I wish you more blank slates. May you have more blank white pages sitting in front you with your favorite pen nearby and at the ready. May you have blank screens in your code editor with your absolutely favorite color syntax highlighting. May your garage work table be empty save for a single large piece of reclaimed redwood and a saw.

Turn off those notifications, turn your phone over, turn on your favorite music, stare at your blank slate and consider what you might build. In that moment of consideration, you’re making an important decision: create or consume? The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant. They are half-considered thoughts of others. When you choose to create, you’re bucking the trend because you’re choosing to take the time to build.

And that’s a great way to start the year.

There’s a new definition of literature in town. It has been slouching toward us for some time now but may have arrived officially in 2009, with the publication of Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America. Alongside essays on Twain, Fitzgerald, Frost, and Henry James, there are pieces about Jackson Pollock, Chuck Berry, the telephone, the Winchester rifle, and Linda Lovelace. Apparently, “literary means not only what is written but what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form” — in which case maps, sermons, comic strips, cartoons, speeches, photographs, movies, war memorials, and music all huddle beneath the literary umbrella. Books continue to matter, of course, but not in the way that earlier generations took for granted. In 2004, “the most influential cultural figure now alive,” according to Newsweek, wasn’t a novelist or historian; it was Bob Dylan. Not incidentally, the index to A New Literary History contains more references to Dylan than to Stephen Crane and Hart Crane combined. Dylan may have described himself as “a song-and-dance man,” but Marcus and Sollors and such critics as Christopher Ricks beg to differ. Dylan, they contend, is one of the greatest poets this nation has ever produced (in point of fact, he has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature every year since 1996).

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true makers of creative work were poets, and what they aspired to was not literature but poesy. A piece of writing was “literary” only if enough learned readers spoke well of it; but as Thomas Rymer observed in 1674, “till of late years England was as free from Criticks, as it is from Wolves.”

So when did literature in the modern sense begin? According to Trevor Ross’s The Making of the English Literary Canon, that would have been on February 22, 1774. Ross is citing with theatrical flair the case of Donaldson v. Beckett, which did away with the notion of “perpetual copyright” and, as one contemporary onlooker put it, allowed “the Works of Shakespeare, of Addison, Pope, Swift, Gay, and many other excellent Authors of the present Century . . . to be the Property of any Person.” It was at this point, Ross claims, that “the canon became a set of commodities to be consumed. It became literature rather than poetry.” What Ross and other historians of literature credibly maintain is that the literary canon was largely an Augustan invention evolving from la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, which pitted cutting-edge seventeenth-century authors against the Greek and Latin poets. Because a canon of vastly superior ancient writers — Homer, Virgil, Cicero — already existed, a modern canon had been slow to develop. One way around this dilemma was to create new ancients closer to one’s own time, which is precisely what John Dryden did in 1700, when he translated Chaucer into Modern English. Dryden not only made Chaucer’s work a classic; he helped canonize English literature itself.

The word canon, from the Greek, originally meant “measuring stick” or “rule” and was used by early Christian theologians to differentiate the genuine, or canonical, books of the Bible from the apocryphal ones. Canonization, of course, also referred to the Catholic practice of designating saints, but the term was not applied to secular writings until 1768, when the Dutch classicist David Ruhnken spoke of a canon of ancient orators and poets.

The usage may have been novel, but the idea of a literary canon was already in the air, as evidenced by a Cambridge don’s proposal in 1595 that universities “take the course to canonize [their] owne writers, that not every bold ballader . . . may pass current with a Poet’s name.” A similar nod toward hierarchies appeared in Daniel Defoe’s A Vindication of the Press (1718) and Joseph Spence’s plan for a dictionary of British poets. Writing in 1730, Spence suggested that the “known marks for ye different magnitudes of the Stars” could be used to establish rankings such as “great Genius & fine writer,” “fine writer,” “middling Poet,” and “one never to be read.” In 1756, Joseph Warton’s essay on Pope designated “four different classes and degrees” of poets, with Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton comfortably leading the field. By 1781, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets had confirmed the canon’s constituents — fifty-two of them — but also fine-tuned standards of literary merit so that the common reader, “uncorrupted with literary prejudice,” would know what to look for.

In effect, the canon formalized modern literature as a select body of imaginative writings that could stand up to the Greek and Latin texts. Although exclusionary by nature, it was originally intended to impart a sense of unity; critics hoped that a tradition of great writers would help create a national literature. What was the apotheosis of Shakespeare and Milton if not an attempt to show the world that England and not France — especially not France — had produced such geniuses? The canon anointed the worthy and, by implication, the unworthy, functioning as a set of commandments that saved people the trouble of deciding what to read.

The canon — later the canon of Great Books — endured without real opposition for nearly two centuries before antinomian forces concluded that enough was enough. I refer, of course, to that mixed bag of politicized professors and theory-happy revisionists of the 1970s and 1980s — feminists, ethnicists, Marxists, semioticians, deconstructionists, new historicists, and cultural materialists — all of whom took exception to the canon while not necessarily seeing eye to eye about much else. Essentially, the postmodernists were against — well, essentialism. While books were conceived in private, they reflected the ideological makeup of their host culture; and the criticism that gave them legitimacy served only to justify the prevailing social order. The implication could not be plainer: If books simply reinforced the cultural values that helped shape them, then any old book or any new book was worthy of consideration. Literature with a capital L was nothing more than a bossy construct, and the canon, instead of being genuine and beneficial, was unreal and oppressive.

Traditionalists, naturally, were aghast. The canon, they argued, represented the best that had been thought and said, and its contents were an expression of the human condition: the joy of love, the sorrow of death, the pain of duty, the horror of war, and the recognition of self and soul. Some canonical writers conveyed this with linguistic brio, others through a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of experience; and their books were part of an ongoing conversation, whose changing sum was nothing less than the history of ideas. To mess with the canon was to mess with civilization itself.

Although it’s pretty to think that great books arise because great writers are driven to write exactly what they want to write, canon formation was, in truth, a result of the middle class’s desire to see its own values reflected in art. As such, the canon was tied to the advance of literacy, the surging book trade, the growing appeal of novels, the spread of coffee shops and clubs, the rise of reviews and magazines, the creation of private circulating libraries, the popularity of serialization and three-decker novels, and, finally, the eventual takeover of literature by institutions of higher learning.

1 In addition to Trevor Ross’s penetrating study, see also Jonathan Kramnick’s Making the English Canon, John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, and the excellent anthology Debating the Canon, edited by Lee Morrissey.

These trends have all been amply documented by a clutch of scholarly works issuing from the canon wars of the Seventies and Eighties; and few critics today would ever think to ignore the cultural complicity inherent in canon formation.¹ Consider, for example, the familiar poetry anthology. As Barbara Benedict explains in Making the Modern Reader, the first anthologies were pieced together less out of aesthetic conviction than out of the desire of printers and booksellers to promote books whose copyrights they held. And because poets wanted to see their work anthologized, they began writing shorter poems to increase their chances for inclusion.

2 But it was literature with a small paradox at its center. Because each set was “complete” at the time of publication (though volumes might be added later), it was a hierarchy without levels. Wordsworth, for one, resented Bell’s edition of The Poets of Great Britain because Abraham Cowley and Thomas Gray held the same pride of place, simply by inclusion, as Chaucer and Shakespeare. 

By the early 1800s, according to Thomas Bonnell, author of That Most Disreputable Trade, uniform sets of poetry or the “complete works” of writers were standard publishing fare; and because the books looked and felt so good — The Aldine Edition of the British Poets (1830–52) was bound in morocco and marbled boards with gilt on the front covers and spines — each decorative volume seemed to shout “Literature.”?² But it would be small-minded, as well as excessive, to claim that commerce alone drove the literary enterprise. Simply because anthologies or serialization influenced the composition of poems and novels didn’t mean that writers tossed aesthetic considerations aside. Canon formation continued to rely on a credible, if not monolithic, consensus among informed readers.

In time, the canon, formerly the province of reviews and magazines, was annexed by institutions of higher learning, which cultivated eminent professors of English and comparative literature and later recruited famous poets and writers to act as gatekeepers. In 1909, Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard, claimed that anyone could earn a sound liberal-arts education simply by spending fifteen minutes a day reading books that fit on a “five-foot shelf.” The shelf, as it turned out, held exactly fifty-one books, which were published by P. F. Collier & Son as the Harvard Classics and went on to sell some 350,000 sets. Eliot’s exhortations notwithstanding, the books were a publishing rather than an educational venture. It wasn’t until John Erskine of Columbia and Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago lobbied, in the 1920s, for a list of indispensable works in literature and philosophy that the canon became equated with a syllabus.

More than anyone else, however, it was Erskine’s student Mortimer J. Adler who popularized the idea of the Great Books. Adler, who also ended up at Chicago, went on to write the best-selling How to Read a Book (1940), whose appendix of “Recommended Reading” (all of it “over most people’s heads”) served as a springboard for the 1952 Encyclopædia Britannica’s ancillary fifty-four-volume series of Great Books of the Western World, selected by — who else? — Adler and Hutchins.

3 Not everyone prostrated himself before the Great Books. Dwight Macdonald objected in 1952: “Minor works by major writers are consistently preferred to major works by minor writers. Thus nearly all Shakespeare is here, including even The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but not Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus or Webster’s Duchess of Malfi or Jonson’s Volpone. Nearly all Milton’s poetry is here, but no Donne, no Herrick, no Marvell, or, for that matter, any other English poetry except Chaucer and Shakespeare.”

Although the canon could groan and shift in its place, as late as 1970 there was probably little disagreement as to what constituted literature.³ Despite the Nobel Prize’s being awarded to some unlikely recipients, as well as to Bertrand Russell, literature generally meant the best literature; and the canon, despite the complicity of institutions and the interests of those involved in the promotion of books, was essentially an aesthetic organism tended by literary and academic gardeners.

In a sense, the canon was like an imposing, upstanding tree, an elm or Sierra redwood, whose main branches originally consisted of epic poetry, comedy and tragedy, a few satires, some religious and philosophical treatises, and the shorter poems and prose works of various Greek and Roman writers. As the tree aged, other limbs formed capable of sustaining Elizabethan drama, nineteenth-century novels, essays, short stories, and lyric poems. Adler’s list of Great Books enumerates 137 authors (including Newton, Poincaré, and Einstein). Adler, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety-eight, may have regretted his strong constitution. The tree he had helped cultivate now bent dangerously under the weight of its own foliage. Other genres — mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance — extended from the trunk, sprouting titles that Adler must have bristled at, including those by women and minority writers whose books flourished, so it was claimed, because of their sex and ethnicity.

In the late Seventies, the anticanonites began taking over the universities, and the English-department syllabus, the canon by another name, was dismantled. Even critics who wrote for general-interest magazines appeared fed up with the idea that some books were better for you than others. Leslie Fiedler, for one, owned up to his susceptibility to not-so-great novels in What Was Literature? (1982). Fiedler maintained that he had been brainwashed by highbrow criticism to the detriment of his own natural enjoyment of pure storytelling. Certain novels, despite “their executive ineptitude and imprecision of language,” moved him, and he wasn’t going to deny it. Such novels, he argued, appealed on some primitive storytelling level; they expressed our need for myth and archetype and had to be considered literature even “at their egregious worst.”

Terry Eagleton has recently gone one better: questioning whether “something called literature actually exists,” in his 2012 book The Event of Literature. Eagleton, who once proposed replacing departments of literature with departments of “discourse studies,” refuses, thirty years after the publication of his highly readable Literary Theory, to cede to literature a single objective reality. As he did in his earlier book, Eagleton incisively surveys the theory surrounding literature and concludes that it can’t really sustain an overarching definition, since there is nothing verbally peculiar to a literary work, and no single feature or set of features is shared by all literary theories.

4 Today, the Library of America confers value on writers by encasing their work in handsome black-jacketed covers with a stripe of red, white, and blue on the spine.

In sum, we live in a time when inequality in the arts is seen as a relativistic crock, when the distinction between popular culture and high culture is said to be either dictatorial or arbitrary. Yet lodged in that accusatory word “inequality” is an idea we refuse to abandon. I mean, of course, quality. The canon may be gone, but the idea of the canon persists.⁴ Penguin Books is now issuing a series of “modern classics,” which the publisher has decided are classics in the making. No doubt some of these novels deserve our consideration — Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge shouldn’t offend even unrepentant highbrows — but what about those books shoehorned in because they occasioned “great movies” or constitute “pure classic escapism”? Do Charles Willeford’s Miami Blues and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, enjoyable as they are, rate as modern classics? Clearly the idea of greatness continues to appeal, and just as clearly our definition of it has changed — as has our definition of literature.

Eighty-five years ago, in The Whirligig of Taste, the British writer E. E. Kellett disabused absolutists of the notion that books are read the same way by successive generations. Kellett concluded his short but far-ranging survey by noting that “almost all critical judgment . . . is in the main built on prejudice.” This, of course, makes consensus about books only slightly more probable than time travel. But if there is even a remote chance of its happening, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge our own deep-seated preferences. The adept critic Desmond MacCarthy once observed that

one cannot get away from one’s temperament any more than one can jump away from one’s shadow, but one can discount the emphasis which it produces. I snub my own temperament when I think it is not leading me straight to the spot where a general panorama of an author’s work is visible.

Although the snubbing of temperament is not easily accomplished, we can try. We can move from being ecstatic readers to being critical readers, hesitating to defend a book because we like it or condemn it because we don’t. For when it comes to books, it isn’t always wise to follow our bliss when bliss gets in the way of reason, and reason alone should be sufficient to tell us that War and Peace is objectively greater than The War of the Worlds, no matter which one we prefer to reread.

Here’s the trick, if that’s the right word: one may regard the canon as a convenient fiction, shaped in part by the material conditions under which writing is produced and consumed, while simultaneously recognizing the validity of hierarchical thinking and aesthetic criteria. Writers may not be able to “escape from contingency,” as the new historicists used to say, but those sensitive to their prisons can transform the walls that confine them — a transformation that requires an awareness of the great poets and novelists who preceded them. Artists look backward in order to move forward. Which is why hierarchical rankings of writers are as natural as those teeming lists of great boxers, tenors, composers, and cabinetmakers. The canon may be unfair and its proponents self-serving, but the fact that there is no set-in-stone syllabus or sacred inventory of Great Books does not mean there are no great books. This is something that seems to have gotten lost in the canon brawl — i.e., the distinction between a list of Great Books and the idea that some books are far better than others.

In a word, Marcus and Sollors are wrong. “Literary” does not refer to “what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form,” and literature does not encompass every book that comes down the pike, however smart or well-made. At the risk of waxing metaphysical, one might argue that literature, like any artifact, has both a Platonic form and an Aristotelian concreteness. Although examples of imaginative writing arrive in all sizes and degrees of proficiency, literature with a capital L, even as its meaning swims in and out of focus, is absolutist in the sense that all serious writers aspire to it. Although writers may be good or bad, literature itself is always good, if not necessarily perfect. Bad literature is, in effect, a contradiction. One can have flawed literature but not bad literature; one can have something “like literature” or even “literature on a humble but not ignoble level,” as Edmund Wilson characterized the Sherlock Holmes stories, but one can’t have dumb or mediocre literature.

Texto de Marcos Adami – Bikemagazine
Fotos de divulgação
Publicado com autorização da Revista Bike Action

Já se foram os anos em que comprar uma bike de qualidade era uma tarefa quase impossível no Brasil. Com a globalização e a abertura das importações no início da década de 90, temos uma gama imensa de modelos que atendem a todos os bolsos e gostos.

As opções são tantas que a escolha pode se tornar difícil para quem vai começar a pedalar. O mercado oferece modelos speed, mountain bikes, híbridas, dobráveis, comfort, lazer, aro 26, aro 29, com suspensão na frente etc.

Escolher o modelo ideal é importante principalmente para não jogar dinheiro fora e para tirar o máximo proveito da bicicleta.

Elaboramos um pequeno guia para auxiliar as pessoas que vão adquirir a primeira bicicleta, com foco nos modelos que podem ser utilizados por iniciantes, por isso, bicicletas de uso mais restrito, como os modelos específicos para triathlon, bicicross, downhill e outras modalidades mais radicais não serão abordados nesse guia.

PASSO A PASSO

1 – O primeiro passo é definir para que você quer comprar  uma bicicleta. Há pessoas que investem milhares de reais numa bicicleta simplesmente porque o amigo comprou uma bicicleta de última geração. Há quem precise de uma bicicleta para usá-la como meio de transporte para o trabalho, escola ou faculdade. Outros vão comprar por ordem médica como forma de perder peso, outros para entrar ou manter a forma. Seja qual for o motivo, é bom ter em mente que essa é uma decisão bem individual.

O que é bom para os outros pode ser muito ruim para você. O que é importante para alguém pode ser totalmente desnecessário para você. Considere, inclusive, a opção de adquirir uma bike usada. Nesse caso, escolha a dedo uma bicicleta de “garagem”, que comprovadamente tenha tido pouquíssimo uso e tenha preço atraente. Uma dica é conferir as ofertas de usadas no site classificados.bikemagazine.com.br

2 – Mas, talvez o mais importante, seja definir o uso que pretende fazer da bike. Diferentes usos exigem diferentes bicicletas, simples assim. Se você mora numa cidade litorânea, repleta de ciclovias à beira-mar e pretende pedalar a maior parte do tempo nessa área, você vai precisar de uma bicicleta bem diferente de alguém que mora numa cidadezinha encravada numa região montanhosa e que vai pedalar em estradas de terra na zona rural. A mesma lógica vale para quem é apaixonado por ciclismo, mora numa região com boas estradas e quer apenas pedalar no asfalto.

3 – Identifique o seu perfil. Se você quer uma bike exclusivamente para lazer, para pedalar em parques com a família, dar uma volta na ciclovia aos domingos para desestressar, fique longe das bikes de competição, nesse caso uma bike mais simples – do tipo híbrida ou comfort bike – já está de bom tamanho.

Se na infância você andou muito de bicicleta, parabéns! Isso vai te ajudar e muito a voltar a pedalar e possivelmente em poucos meses você terá evoluído rapidamente para participar de passeios e outros eventos ciclísticos.

Nesse caso, a compra de um modelo mais leve e com componentes melhores pode ser uma boa pedida.

Da mesma forma, pessoas com mais aptidão física, que já são praticantes de outros esportes (futebol, corrida a pé, natação etc), podem investir em uma bicicleta que possa ser usada em competições. São bicicletas mais caras, mas que certamente trazem componentes melhores e mais duráveis.

Já os mais sedentários levarão mais tempo para entrar em forma e mais tempo para evoluir: portanto, uma bicicleta mais básica, num primeiro momento, pode ser o ideal.

Pessoas com menos flexibilidade terão mais dificuldade em se adaptar com as bicicletas de ciclismo, também chamadas de speed ou road. Indivíduos acima do peso vão precisar de uma bike robusta, com componentes de qualidade.

4 – Pesquise. Leia bastante sobre o assunto e troque ideias com quem pedala. Quanto mais informações reunir sobre o tema, melhor será na hora de decidir pela compra.

5 – Bicicletas devem ser compradas em lojas especializadas, também chamadas de bike shops, sob os cuidados de um profissional que oriente na escolha. A grande maioria das cidades brasileiras tem pelo menos uma boa loja de bicicleta. Se na sua cidade não há nenhuma loja assim, vale a pena dar um pulo numa cidade de maior porte e visitar algumas lojas.

6 – Assim como sapatos, bicicletas também têm tamanho e é fundamental comprar a bike no tamanho certo. Certifique-se do tamanho certo para você antes de efetuar a compra. Um bom profissional saberá indicar o tamanho de quadro correto para seu tipo físico.

O ideal é que você faça um pequeno teste drive se estiver em dúvida quanto ao tamanho. Se você for tiver acima de 1,85m ou abaixo de 1,65m, fique atento, pois as bicicletas nacionais de recreação e lazer vêm todas num tamanho padrão e podem ser um problema. Algumas marcas e modelos, normalmente as mais caras, estão disponíveis numa ampla grade de tamanhos.

Tabela básica – altura do ciclista x tamanho da bicicleta
Fonte: Escola de Bicicleta

Atenção: os tamanhos acima são baseados em médias. É recomendado que você faça um teste drive para comprar na certeza.

7 – Na hora de fechar negócio, vale a dica: invista na melhor bicicleta que seu dinheiro puder alcançar. Vale muito a pena investir num bom produto que só vai te trazer benefícios, saúde e alegria. Uma bike de R$ 3 mil certamente oferece mais benefícios que uma de R$ 1.200.

8 – É importante. antes de sair para a compra, definir claramente qual a faixa de preço da bicicleta. Chegar na loja com o tipo, o modelo e a faixa de preço já definidos facilita bastante a escolha final do produto. Pense bem: se você tem R$ 3mil disponível para gastar, poupe o tempo do vendedor que quer te vender uma bike de R$ 8 mil. Lembre-se de reservar parte de sua verba para adquirir os acessórios e vestuário, como bermudas, as luvas, os óculos e, claro, o indispensável capacete.

9 – Negocie com calma. Pechinchar faz parte de qualquer negociação. As bicicletas têm preços definidos pelos fabricantes e importadores, mas sempre há uma margem de negociação com a loja, seja num desconto à vista, seja nas opções de parcelamento ou nos brindes que podem acompanha a bicicleta como capacetes, bolsa de selim, uma bomba, um agrado.

10 – A marca da bicicleta pode ser definida na hora, de acordo com seu gosto, cores, grafismo etc. Os componentes (marca das peças) são praticamente os mesmos usados em todas as marcas.

Praticamente toda loja oferece uma revisão gratuita após 30 dias de uso. Essa revisão é importante para ajustar os freios e os câmbios e para um reaperto geral; aproveite para tirar eventuais dúvidas.

OS PRINCIPAIS TIPOS DE BICICLETA

Lazer e recreação
Há vários tipos de bicicletas que podem ser classificadas como bicicletas de lazer e recreação. Enquadram-se aqui as Comfort Bikes, Beach Bikes (bicicletas praianas) e os modelos mountain bikes mais simples.

São bicicletas mais robustas, com uma geometria confortável e que empregam componentes mais simples que tornam o preço bastante atraente. Podem ser a grande pedida para quem está em busca de uma bike simples para lazer e sem maiores aspirações.

São perfeitas para pedalar no parque, na ciclovia, em passeios ciclísticos e em deslocamentos de curta distância. Mas são limitadas para outras aplicações, como trilhas ou viagens longas de cicloturismo.

O mercado oferece muitas opções nessa categoria, com opções de câmbios de 21, 24 ou até 27 velocidades. Exemplos: Caloi 100 (R$ 529) e Caloi 500 (R$ 899) e Soul Ace (R$ 800).

Mountain Bikes
São as bikes mais comuns hoje em dia. Têm a grande vantagem de serem as mais versáteis e encaram desde um passeio no parque, uma viagem de cicloturismo e até corridas em terrenos difíceis. Grosso modo, atendem as necessidades de praticamente 80% dos ciclistas. Hoje, praticamente todas já saem de fábrica com suspensão na frente e com freios a disco nas duas rodas. Os preços vão variar bastante em função dos componentes que, por sua vez. vão influenciar diretamente no peso da bicicleta. Há opções nacionais (Caloi, Houston, Soul) a partir de R$ 1.600.

Há também modelos com suspensão na traseira (as full suspension), que são bem confortáveis no off  road. Mas atenção, pois uma bike full suspension pesa bastante e os modelos de baixo peso custam bem caro.

Os quadros podem ser feitos de aço (muito pesados), alumínio (tendem a ser mais leves e duráveis) e de carbono (bem leves e mais caros), que são perfeitos para quem quer competir.

A última palavra em mountain bikes são os modelos com aro 29, que por terem a roda maior, passam com facilidade e rodam com mais facilidade em terrenos planos por terem maior inércia.

Uma dica para quem quer fazer cicloturismo: escolha um modelo que tenha furação nos stays traseiros. Esse detalhe será fundamental na hora de fixar o bagageiro para levar os alforjes.

Ciclismo
Também chamadas de speed ou road bikes, esse tipo de bicicleta é para um público bastante específico. Com pneus finos e delicados, são bicicletas feitas para rodar em bons pisos asfaltados, com uma posição de pedalada que pode ser bastante desconfortável para muitos.

Os modelos mais em conta são feitos de alumínio, mas há também opções (mais leves e mais caras) em fibra de carbono e também em titânio. Se pretender pedalar em regiões montanhosas considere adquirir uma speed com pedivela compacto e um cassete de 25 ou 27 dentes na traseira. Há modelos nacionais da Caloi e Soul a partir de R$ 2.500.

Dobráveis
Essas bicicletas compactas ainda são novidade no Brasil. Normalmente têm aro 20 e são perfeitas para serem utilizadas no transporte urbano do dia a dia. Quando dobradas, podem ser carregadas a tiracolo e embarcam facilmente em trens e ônibus ou ainda guardadas num cantinho do apartamento ou escritório.

Os modelos mais comuns no Brasil são a Dahon, a Blitz , a Soul e, mais recentemente, o modelo Urbe da Caloi, vendida a R$ 1.500. Mas atenção: são pouco versáteis e indicadas para deslocamentos de curta distância.

Híbridas
São bikes multiuso, em geral com aro 27 e pneus mistos, que vão bem tanto no uso urbano e quanto em longas pedaladas no asfalto e cicloturismo. Podem ser uma opção interessante para boa parte de ciclistas que buscam pedaladas tranquilas nos momentos de lazer já que não foram feitas para competir e nem para enfrentarem trilhas.

A Caloi tem o modelo Easy Rider (R$ 1.100) e a Scott oferece os modelos da linha Sub.

AJUDA ONLINE
O site da Caloi (www.caloi.com.br) oferece uma ferramenta interessante que auxilia o novato a escolher o modelo de acordo com as informações fornecidas ao site, como quantidade de marchas, utilização, material do quadro, preço etc.

• Iniciantes, Mais lidas do ano, Primeira bike

The 2014 ConIFA World Football Cup is the first edition of the ConIFA World Football Cup, an international football tournament for states, minorities, stateless peoples and regions unaffiliated with FIFA organised by ConIFA. The tournament is being hosted by FA Sápmi in the Sápmi region, with all games held in the city of Östersund in Sweden.

Tournament[edit]

In May 2013 ConIFA announced that Sápmi had been chosen to host the inaugural ConIFA World Football Cup in Östersund, Sweden. It will be an invitational tournament^[1] played between the 1st June and 8th June 2014,^[2] with all matches being held in the 5092-capacity Jämtkraft Arena.^[3]

Twelve teams will take part in the tournament.^{[4][5][6][7][8][9]}Catalonia^[10] and Rapa Nui^[11] were thought to be potential participants, but ultimately declined or withdrew. The format of the tournament and the scheduling of matches is yet to be announced.

In parallel with the tournament, a festival celebrating the cultural diversity of the teams involved will be held in Östersund.^[12]

Participants[edit]

The twelve participating teams were drawn into the three groups of four teams for the group stage. In preparation for this, the teams were organised into three pots.^[13] The draw was made by ConIFA World President Per-Anders Blind in Östersund on 24 March 2014.

Pot 1	Pot 2	Pot 3
Iraqi Kurdistan[14]  Padania[15]  Sápmi[16]  Zanzibar[2]	Arameans Suryoye[2]  Nagorno-Karabakh[2]  Occitania[17][18]  Quebec[19][20][21]	Abkhazia[2] Darfur[22] Ellan Vannin[23]  Tamil Eelam[2]

Of the twelve invited teams, eight had previously participated at the Viva World Cup.^[13]

Withdrawals[edit]

The draw initially placed Quebec in Group C and Zanzibar in Group D. However, in May 2014, it was announced that both Quebec and Zanzibar had withdrawn from the tournament. The Quebec team had affiliated with the Fédération de soccer du Québec, with the intention that the FSQ eventually apply for membership of CONCACAF. To this end, the team will only play internationals against full national teams that are members of either CONCACAF or FIFA, and will no longer participate in Non-FIFA Football.^[24] The Zanzibar team were unable to obtain visas to enter Sweden and were thus forced to pull out of the tournament.^[25] Quebec's place was taken by South Ossetia, while Zanzibar were replaced by County of Nice.

Matches[edit]

Group Stage[edit]

Group A[edit]

Team	Pld	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	Pts
Arameans Suryoye	1	1	0	0	2	1	+1	3
Tamil Eelam	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Iraqi Kurdistan	1	0	0	1	1	2	−1	0

Group B[edit]

Team	Pld	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	Pts
Occitania	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1
Abkhazia	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1
Sápmi	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Group C[edit]

Team	Pld	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	Pts
Padania	1	1	0	0	20	0	+20	3
South Ossetia	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Darfur	1	0	0	1	0	20	−20	0

Group D[edit]

Team	Pld	W	D	L	GF	GA	GD	Pts
Ellan Vannin	1	1	0	0	3	2	+1	3
Nagorno-Karabakh	1	0	0	1	2	3	−1	0
County of Nice	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Knockout stage and placement round[edit]

	Quarter-finals				Semi-finals				Final
	4 June – Östersund
	Winner Group C
					6 June – Östersund
	Runner-up Group D
					Winner Match 13
	4 June – Östersund
					Winner Match 14
	Winner Group B
									8 June – Östersund
	Runner-up Group C
									Winner Match 21
	4 June – Östersund
									Winner Match 22
	Winner Group A
					6 June – Östersund
	Runner-up Group B
					Winner Match 15				Third place
	4 June – Östersund
					Winner Match 16				8 June – Östersund
	Winner Group D
									Loser Match 21
	Runner-up Group A
									Loser Match 22

Placement Round 1		Placement Round 2			Placings
5 June - Östersund		7 June - Östersund			5th Place	Winner Match 26
Third Group A		Loser Match 17			6th Place	Loser Match 26
Third Group B		Loser Match 18			7th Place	Winner Match 25
5 June - Östersund		7 June - Östersund			8th Place	Loser Match 25
Third Group C		Winner Match 17			9th Place	Winner Match 24
Third Group D		Winner Match 18			10th Place	Loser Match 24
5 June - Östersund		7 June - Östersund			11th Place	Winner Match 23
Loser Match 13		Loser Match 19			12th Place	Loser Match 23
Loser Match 14		Loser Match 20
5 June - Östersund		7 June - Östersund
Loser Match 15		Winner Match 19
Loser Match 16		Winner Match 20

Quarter-Finals[edit]

Placement Round 1[edit]

Placement Round 2[edit]

Semi-Finals[edit]

Third-place play-off[edit]

Final[edit]

References[edit]

See also[edit]

• Viva World Cup

External Links[edit]

• Official Website

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2014_ConIFA_World_Football_Cup&oldid=611117314"

Alguns economistas fora do governo ainda fazem previsões otimistas para o crescimento da economia neste ano. "Otimistas" nos devidos ou tristemente indevidos termos.

O pessoal da FGV do Rio, do Ibre, estima que o PIB cresça 1,6% neste 2014. Segundo a centena de estimativas privadas recolhida semanalmente pelo Banco Central divulgada ontem, o país deve crescer 1,2%.

Alguns grupos de economistas, nem se trata de gente descabelada, preveem 1%. Estagnação, em termos per capita (levando em conta o crescimento da população, a produção ou a renda nacionais não terão crescido nada).

Essa diferença de meio décimo nas previsões e na realidade tem alguma importância apenas no curto prazo, não diz grande coisa sobre o futuro da economia. De ponto de vista político e social, estimar eventual tombo do PIB pode ter interesse maior. Assim, é relevante saber se o colapso na confiança de consumidores e empresários, que vem desde março, é ou não transitório.

Pode ser que essa piora adicional e rápida do humor de consumidores e empresários tenha sido provocada por protestos, greves, tumultos e perturbações devidas à Copa. Logo, isso pode passar. Como disse ontem Nelson Barbosa, ex-secretário-executivo do Ministério da Fazenda, em seminário na FGV, a expectativa de piora é tão grande que, ao não se confirmar o pior, a melhora de humor possa ser quase tão intensa. É, pode.

Até agora, as pesquisas que medem opiniões a respeito do estado e do futuro da economia registram sentimento tão ruim quanto o verificado no ano de ligeira recessão de 2009 (a economia encolheu). De 45 segmentos do empresariado da indústria e dos serviços pesquisados pela FGV, em 82% houve piora do humor em maio, um sentimento espraiado de desânimo, em geral indicador prévio de retração da atividade econômica.

Do mesmo modo importante é entender o que se passa no mercado de trabalho. Como já se escreveu nestas colunas, chama a atenção do pessoal da FGV o descompasso entre as pesquisas de emprego do IBGE.

Em uma delas, a tradicional Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME), que trata de seis grandes regiões metropolitanas, faz seis meses o número de pessoas empregadas parou de crescer (quando se compara cada mês com seu equivalente no ano anterior).

Na nova Pnad Contínua, que começou a ser divulgada no início deste ano, o número de pessoas empregadas cresce, e cresce bem (menos na região Sudeste). A Pnad Contínua é um levantamento trimestral muitíssimo mais abrangente, que cobre cerca de 3.500 cidades. No entanto, ainda não publica dados de salários. Logo, a gente não sabe lá muito bem que tipo de emprego e qual rendimento conseguem as pessoas que estão engrossando a população ocupada, segundo a Pnad.

Ainda assim, os economistas do Ibre acreditam que, tomados em conjunto, os indicadores da PME, da Pnad e os do Caged (registro administrativo de emprego formal) sugerem um mercado de trabalho ainda bem aquecido, com o que fica difícil prever uma queda significativa de salários, na média, e menos ainda uma alta ruim do desemprego. Isto é, em tese, um esteio que pode evitar colapso da economia neste ano.

If you write a book about alcohol and male writers, as I did, the one question you'll be asked more than any other is: what about the women? Are there any alcoholic female writers? And are their stories the same, or different? The answer to the first question is easy. Yes, of course there are, among them such brilliant, restless figures as Jean Rhys, Jean Stafford, Marguerite Duras, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane Bowles, Anne Sexton, Carson McCullers, Dorothy Parker and Shirley Jackson. Alcoholism is more prevalent in men than women (in 2013, the NHS calculated that 9% of men and 4% of women were alcohol-dependent). Still, there is no shortage of female drinkers; no lack of falling-down afternoons and binges that stretch sweatily into days. Female writers haven't been immune to the lure of the bottle, nor to getting into the kinds of trouble – the fights and arrests, the humiliating escapades, the slow poisoning of friendships and familial relations – that have dogged their male colleagues. Jean Rhys was briefly in Holloway prison for assault; Elizabeth Bishop more than once drank eau de cologne, having exhausted the possibilities of the liquor cabinet. But are their reasons for drinking different? And how about society's responses, particularly in the lubricated, tipsy 20th century; the golden age, if one can call it that, of alcohol and the writer?

In her 1987 book Practicalities, the French novelist and film-maker Marguerite Duras says many shocking things about what it means to be a woman and a writer. One of her most striking statements is about the difference between male and female drinking – or rather the difference in how the two are perceived. "When a woman drinks," she writes, "it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature." Ruefully, she adds a personal coda: "I realised the scandal I was creating around me."

She'd been an alcoholic, she figured, from the moment of her first drink. Sometimes she managed to stop for years at a time, but during her bingeing periods she'd go all-out: start as soon as she woke up, pausing to vomit the first two glasses, then polishing off as many as eight litres of Bordeaux before passing out in a stupor. "I drank because I was an alcoholic," she told the New York Times in 1991. "I was a real one – like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."

Dorothy Parker at work in Pennsylvania, with her husband, the screenwriter Alan Campbell in the background, 1937. Photograph: Jacob Lofman/Getty

What is also astonishing is how much she managed to write, and how fine most of it is, rising coolly above the sometimes dire conditions of production. Duras wrote dozens of novels, among them The Sea Wall, Moderato Cantabile and The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Her work is elegant, experimental, impassioned, incantatory and visually striking – almost hallucinatory in its appeal to the senses, its rhythmic force. A forerunner of the nouveau roman, she dispensed with the conventions of character and plot, the heavy furniture of the realist novel, at the same time retaining an almost classical austerity – a clarity of style that resulted from obsessive redrafting.

Duras's childhood was marked by fear, violence and shame: a common enough concatenation in the early life of the addict. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu (Duras is a pen name) in 1914 in what was then Saigon to French parents, both of whom were teachers. When she was seven, her father died, leaving the family in abject poverty. Her mother saved for years to buy a farm, but was cheated on the price, buying land that was regularly inundated by the sea. Both Marguerite's mother and her elder brother beat her. She remembered hunting for birds in the jungle to cook and eat, and swimming in a river that would fill with the corpses of miscellaneous creatures that had drowned upstream. At school, she had a sexual relationship – seemingly encouraged by her family for financial reasons – with a much older Chinese man. Later, in France, she married, had a son with someone else, made films, and lived and wrote with a singleminded intensity. Her drinking worsened as the decades passed, stopping and starting, gaining traction, until at the age of 68 she was diagnosed with cirrhosis and forced to dry out – a terrifying experience – at the American hospital in Paris.

Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output: testament not so much to the power of alcohol as a creative stimulant as to its role in destroying brain function, obliterating memory and playing havoc with the ability to formulate and express thought in former alcoholics. But Duras wrote one of her best and certainly most famous novels two years after she stopped drinking. The Lover tells the story of a 15-year-old French girl in Indochina who has an erotic relationship with – yes – a much older Chinese man. Much of the book was drawn from the violence and degradation from which Duras had emerged.

As later published versions make clear, she was capable of returning again and again to this primal scene of childhood, redrawing it in an almost infinite variety of colours: sometimes erotic and romantic, sometimes brutal and grotesque. Retelling the same stories; going back repeatedly to the substance that she knew was destroying her: these repetitive acts, some generative and some profoundly destructive, made the critic Edmund White wonder if Duras was not in the grips of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists," she once told an interviewer, and it is this intensity, this absolute and uncompromising vision, that sets her work apart. At the same time, this statement seems to shine a light on how she used alcohol: as a way of giving in to her own masochism, her suicidal ideation, while simultaneously anaesthetising herself from the savagery she saw at work everywhere, filling the world.

Duras's nightmarish childhood raises the question of origins, of what causes alcohol addiction and whether it is different for men and women. Alcoholism is roughly 50% hereditable, a matter of genetic predisposition, which is to say that environmental factors such as early life experience and societal pressure play a considerable role. Picking through the biographies of alcoholic female writers, one finds again and again the same dismal family histories that are present in the lives of their male counterparts, from Ernest Hemingway to F Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams to John Cheever.

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop is a good example. Many members of her family were alcoholics, including her father, who died when she was a baby. Bishop's life was additionally marred by the kind of loss and physical insecurity often present in the family histories of addicts. When she was five her mother was institutionalised. They never saw each other again. Instead, Bishop was parcelled between aunts, an anxious child who, as a student at the liberal women-only Smith College, in Massachusetts, gratefully discovered the use of alcohol as a social lubricant, not realising until too late that it was also a potent source of shame, isolating in its own right.

In the poem "A Drunkard", Bishop uses incidents from her own life to create an ironic portrait of an alcoholic, keen to explain their abnormal thirst. "I had begun / to drink, & drink – I can't get enough", the narrator confesses, a line that recalls John Berryman's frank "Dream Song" statement: "Hunger was constitutional with him, / wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need need".

Shame was one of the central drivers in Bishop's drinking: first, the internalised shame she carried from her childhood and, later, the shame that followed her own appalling binges. Then, too, there was the matter of sexual identity. A lesbian in a period in which homosexuality was not sanctioned or accepted, Bishop found her greatest freedom in Brazil, where she lived with her female partner, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. She spent her most peaceful and productive years there, though even they were interleaved with drunkenness, followed by the inevitable fights and confusions, and the frightening decline in physical health.

Shame is also a factor in the life of Patricia Highsmith, who was born Mary Patricia Plangman in 1921, her surname an unwelcome memento of the man her mother had divorced nine days before she was born. She wasn't exactly welcome herself. Her mother had drunk turpentine at four months, hoping to abort the baby. "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," she later said. This grim joke recalls Cheever, whose parents also used to kid about having tried to abort him. Like Cheever, Highsmith had complex feelings about her mother, and like Cheever she had a pervasive sense of being fraudulent, empty, somehow a fake. Unlike Cheever, however, she was courageous in facing up to the direction of her sexual desires, though she did have a sometimes pleasurable, sometimes troubling sense of deviance, of running counter to society's grain.

Patricia Highsmith at home in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1987. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty

She was an anxious, guilty, tearful child – lugubrious, in her own words. By eight, she was fantasising about murdering her stepfather Stanley and at 12 she was disturbed by violent rows between him and her mother. That autumn, Patricia's mother took her to Texas, saying that she was going to get divorced and live in the south with Pat and her grandmother. But after a few weeks of this all-female utopia, Mrs Highsmith returned to New York, abandoning her daughter without explanation. Left high and dry for a whole miserable year, Patricia never got over the sense of betrayal, the belief that she had been personally rejected.

Her drinking began as a student at New York's Barnard College. In a diary entry in the 1940s, she wrote of her belief that drink was essential for the artist because it made her "see the truth, the simplicity, and the primitive emotions once more". Ten years on, she was describing days in which she went to bed at four in the afternoon with a bottle of gin before putting away seven Martinis and two glasses of wine. By the 1960s, she needed booze to keep going and as an eye-opener in the morning, lied about her drinking and lied too about all kinds of large and small details – about what a good cook and gardener she was, though her garden at the time was dried-up grass and she often lived off cereal and fried eggs.

Much of how she felt and behaved went into her work, passing fluidly into her most famous character. Tom Ripley is not always a heavy drinker but he shares with the full-blown alcoholic his paranoia, his guilt and self-hatred; his need to obliterate or escape his painfully empty, flimsy self. He is forever splitting or slithering into other, more comfortable, identities, though this in itself is shameful and often serves as the impetus for his casual and dreadful murders. In fact, Ripley's entire career as a killer mimics alcoholism in that it is driven by a need to constantly repeat an activity in order to snuff out the trouble the activity has caused. Then too there's the atmosphere of the books, the looming sense of anxiety and doom, instantly familiar from any number of alcoholic works. Consider this passage from The Talented Mr Ripley, in which Tom is in Rome, trying to convince himself he won't be caught for Dickie's murder:

Jane Bowles in 1967. Photograph: Terrence Spencer/Getty

Tom did not know who would attack him, if he were attacked. He did not imagine police, necessarily. He was afraid of nameless, formless things that haunted his brain like the Furies. He could go through San Spiridione comfortably only when a few cocktails had knocked out his fear. Then he walked through swaggering and whistling.

Cut the name, and it could be lifted directly from Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend or almost any page of Tennessee Williams's drink-besotted diaries.

There is no doubt that personal unhappiness is part of why both men and women develop the habit of drinking, but these intimate stories leave out something larger, something less easy for any individual to challenge or address. What lives were like for women in the west for the majority of the 20th century is ably and angrily summed up by Elizabeth Young in her introduction to Plain Pleasures, the collected stories of Jane Bowles. "Up until the 1970s women were discounted and despised," she writes. "They were, en masse, classed with children in terms of capability but, unlike children, were the butt of virtually every joke in the comedian's repertoire. They were considered trite, gossipy, vain, slow and useless. Older women were hags, battle-axes, mother-in-laws, spinsters. Women were visible in the real world, the world of men, only while they were sexually desirable. Afterwards they vanished completely, buried alive by the creepy combination of contempt, disgust and sentimentality with which they were regarded."

By way of illustration, she tells a story about the writer who Truman Capote, William Burroughs and Gore Vidal considered among the greatest of her age: a giant of modernism, despite her tiny output. After having an alcohol-induced stroke in middle age, Jane Bowles was sent to see a British neurologist, who patronisingly told her: "You're not coping, my dear Mrs Bowles. Go back to your pots and pans and try to cope."

This intense disregard for women, this inability to comprehend their talents or inner lives, was typical. Similar scenarios can be found in the lives of almost any 20th-century woman writer of note. Take Jean Stafford, who these days is more likely to be remembered for her marriage to Robert Lowell than for her Pulitzer prize-winning stories or her extraordinary, savage novel The Mountain Lion. This latter work was published in 1947, while she was drying out at Payne Whitney, a mental hospital in upstate New York. There, her psychiatrist was less interested in her reviews than in insisting she improve her grooming, switching her habitual baggy sweater and slacks for a blouse and skirt, with pearls for dinner, like, Stafford said wryly, "a Smith College girl".

Jean Rhys

I can think of no writer who better expresses these pressures and hypocrisies than the novelist Jean Rhys, who can hardly be described as a feminist and yet who wrote so bitterly and so bleakly about the lot of women that her work is disturbing even now. Rhys was born Gwen Williams on the island of Dominica in 1890, to a British father and Creole mother. Like F Scott Fitzgerald, she was a replacement child, conceived nine months after the death of her sister. Like Fitzgerald, she had a pervasive sense of standing outside, of not being quite real or legitimately lovable. She came to London at 16, a pretty and hopelessly ignorant girl. Her expectations of a new and glamorous life were dashed by the puddingy greyness, the bitter cold, and the competent, casually cruel people. Her father died while she was at drama school, but instead of going home she slipped away, becoming a chorus girl and changing her name to Ella Gray.

Ella Gray, Ella Lenglet, Jean Rhys, Mrs Hamer: whatever name she was travelling under, Rhys was always on the verge of drowning, always frantic to find a man who would scoop her up and lift her into the kind of safe, luxurious world she craved. Unused to love, she picked badly or perhaps was just unlucky, choosing men who left her or who were somehow incapable of providing the sort of financial and emotional security she needed. She had an abortion, married, had a baby who died and a daughter, Maryvonne (who spent most of her childhood being cared for not only by someone else but in a different country from her mother), married for a second and then a third time, and was throughout these misadventures always at the brink of destitution, the very outer edge.

Alcohol quickly became a way of dealing with this trouble and confusion, of blotting out the darker elements, temporarily filling an unbearable black hole of need. As her biographer Carole Angier puts it: "Her past tormented her so that she had to write about it, and then writing tormented her: she had to drink to write, and she had to drink to live."

But what emerged from the muddle and mess was a series of miraculously lucid novels: strange, slippery marvels of modernism, about alienated, rootless women adrift among the demi-monde of London and Paris. These books – Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight – show the world as it appears from the vantage of the dispossessed. They are about depression and loneliness, yes, but they're also about money: money and class and snobbery and what it means if you can't afford to eat or your shoes are wearing out and you can no longer keep up the little genteel illusions, the ways of getting by, of being accepted in society. Rhys is brutal in her depiction of a world in which there is no safety net for a woman alone and getting older, running short of the only reliable currency she has.

In the magnificently unstable Good Morning, Midnight she shows precisely why such a woman might turn to drink, given limited options for work or love. At the same time, and like her near-contemporary Fitzgerald, she uses drunkenness as a technique of modernism. The novel is written in a wonderfully flexible first person, slip-sliding through Sasha's shifting moods. "I've had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, of crying myself to sleep every night. I've had enough of thinking, enough of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles labelled 'Dum vivimus, vivamus … ' Drink, drink, drink … As soon as I sober up I start again. I have to force it down sometimes. You'd think I'd get delirium tremens or something."

During the war, Rhys vanished yet again from public view, re-emerging in 1956 after the BBC ran an advert looking for information on the author believed to be dead. She spent the 1960s shipwrecked in the aptly named Landboat Bungalows in Devon, living with her third husband, the nervy Max Hamer, who had been in prison for fraud and was now invalided after a stroke. In this dismal period, Rhys was tormented by extremes of poverty and depression and also by her neighbours, who believed she was a witch. She was briefly put in a mental hospital after attacking one of them with a pair of scissors. The drinking continued unabated, worse than before. All the same, she was working away on a new novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre that drew on her childhood in the Caribbean, her feelings of being an outsider, left out in the cold by the icy, inscrutable English.

"No one," Diana Athill writes in Stet, "who has read Jean Rhys's first four novels can suppose that she was very good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was." Athill became Rhys's editor around this time, befriending her as did Sonia Orwell and Francis Wyndham, who were the protectors and guardians of her renaissance, the success that came too late and after too much hardship to make a real difference to Rhys's ravaged internal world.

In her writing about Rhys, Athill puzzles over what might be the central question of the alcoholic writer, which is how someone so very bad at living, so incapable of facing up to trouble and taking responsibility for their own mess might be so very good at writing about it, at peering directly into what are otherwise total blind spots. "Her creed – so simple to state, so difficult to follow – was that she must tell the truth: must get things down as they really were … this fierce endeavour enabled her to write her way through to understanding her own damaged nature."

This fierceness is everywhere in Rhys's work, converting self-pity into a pitiless critique. She shows how power works and how cruel people can be to those who are beneath them, revealing, too, how poverty and social mores pinion women, limiting their options until a Holloway cell and a Parisian hotel room come to seem pretty much indistinguishable. It's not by any means a triumphant kind of feminism, an assertion of independence and equality, but rather a savage, haunted account of stacked cards and loaded dice that might drive even the sanest woman to drink and drink and drink.

• Olivia Laing's The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking is out now in paperback (Canongate, £10.99).