Results for “best book” 1835 found
Against accountability in the arts
The value of “accountability” is often counterproductive when applied to direct subsidies for art. To be sure, accountability is critically important in many contexts. For instance CEOs should be accountable to shareholders. But we do not stress accountability in every sphere of human activity. For instance, tenured college professors are not (usually) accountable to university administrators for the content of their ideas. Instead we believe that an ethic of academic freedom will best promote the mission of the university. Supreme Court Justices are not accountable for the content of their decisions, although Congress may respond by passing new laws, or the Constitution may be amended.
Along these lines, direct subsidies stand the greatest chance of making a positive difference when they are insulated from many pressures of accountability. We should return to the stylized facts about artistic discovery, namely that there are many failures for every success. Too much direct accountability causes the funder to be excessively afraid of failure. This limits risk-taking and in the longer run limits the number of successes. Accountability works best when the quality of the average outcome is a good indicator of the tails of the distribution; this is not generally the case with the arts.
By the way, here is the last paragraph of the book:
Given that so much of the aesthetic is hidden, what appears to be the subordination of poetry to philosophy is an illusion, albeit a creativity-enhancing illusion. Rather than subordinating poetry to philosophy, at most I have subordinated the public conception of art to philosophy. Poetry remains secure in its diverse and hidden niches, and indeed is healthiest when philosophy directs the public conception of art toward a regime of markets, indirect subsidies, and decentralization. In this sense we can put philosophy at the service of art, and not at war with it. I wish to overturn the victory that Socrates pretended to award to philosophy over poetry, and to paint an alternative vision of the broader compatibility between the two enterprises.
Government jobs as arts subsidy
Often governments support the arts best when they are intent on some other purpose:
The very existence of government jobs subsidizes the arts. Even in the best of times, most writers find it difficult to make a living from book sales alone. Many accept government jobs, hoping they will have time to pursue their own projects. Bureaucracy, despite its deadening effects, stimulates creativity by creating a realm of personal freedom for many employees.
William Faulkner worked for a time as postmaster at the University of Mississippi postal station. He called his section of the post office the "reading room." Nathaniel Hawthorne worked in a customs house, after failing to get a postmaster job. Walt Whitman revised his Leaves of Grass while working for the Department of the Interior, although his superior fired him because he regarded the book as immoral. Herman Melville worked in a customs house as well, although not at the time of his greatest literary productivity. William Charvat estimated that between 1800 and 1875, 60 to 75 percent of American male writers "who even approached professionalism either held public office or tried to get it."
The role of government jobs is no less prominent in the history of literature more generally. Chaucer was a career public servant, Dante pursued politics, Goethe was a bureaucrat for much of his life, and Anthony Trollope held a job in the postal service, during which time he wrote most of his sixty novels. William Wordsworth, Daniel Defoe, and the Roman poet Horace worked as tax collectors. Jonathan Swift was clergy in a tax-supported church. Stendahl worked in the Napoleonic bureaucracy. In the social sciences, Adam Smith worked in the customs house and Edward Gibbon was a member of Parliament and lord of trade.
It is a moot point whether we should count prison as a government "job," but many notable literary works have been written in enforced confinement, most notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Prison literature has been a growing genre in the United States since at least the 1960s. A longer list of incarcerated writers includes Boethius, Villon, Thomas More, Campanella, Walter Raleigh, Donne, Richard Lovelace, Bunyan, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Thoreau, Melville, Leigh Hunt, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Genet, O. Henry, Robert Lowell, Brendan Behan, Chernyeshevsky, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn.
I don’t have to tell you whose book that is from. I wrote it, of course, while working for a state university.
Caught my eye
1. The Selfish Gene, thirty years later, transcript and audio file.
2. Inside Man. I’ve been burned by Spike Lee movies too many, oh so many times, but this one is excellent. It is also a study in game theory and the value of meta-rationality. While we are on the topic, how did I forget Live and Let Die – the only good Roger Moore James Bond film — on my list of notable movies set in Louisiana?
3. Charles Murray on his new book and plan for welfare reform. An interesting idea, but can you say "time inconsistency" three times in a row fast?
4. James Surowiecki on why newspapers are not doomed.
5. Don’t expect too much from job retraining.
6. Steve Levitt’s Africa fact of the day, and yes it involves both sex and violence.
7. Stanislaw Lem passes away; could his Solaris be the best science fiction novel ever? Don’t forget the Tarkovsky film version either.
My favorite things Virginia
It feels like an eon since I have traveled, plus I have been at home with the sniffles and a nasty cough. So here goes:
1. Music: Right off the bat we are in trouble. Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News but she is overrated (overly mannered and too self-consciously pandering to the crowd). We do have Patsy Cline and Maybelle Carter, the latter was an awesome guitar player and a precursor of John Fahey, not to mention the mother of June Carter.
2. Writer: There is Willa Cather, William Styron, and the new Thomas Wolfe. Cather moved at age ten to Nebraska. Some of you might sneak Poe into the Virginia category, but in my mind he is too closely linked to Baltimore. If you count non-fiction, add Booker T. Washington to the list.
3. Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Person: I have to go with Helen Keller. If you choose her for "20 Questions," no one will hit upon her category.
4. Movie, set in. The first part of Silence of the Lambs is set in Quantico, Virginia. No Way Out, starring Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner, is set in DC and around the Pentagon.
5. Artist: Help! Can you do better than Sam Snead? George Caleb Bingham was born here, but I identify him with Missouri.
6. The Presidents. I’ll pick Washington as the best, simply because he had a successor, and Madison as the best political theorist. Jefferson’s writings bore me and Woodrow Wilson was one of the worst Presidents we have had.
The bottom line: Maybe you are impressed by the Presidents, but for a state so old, it makes a pretty thin showing. It has lacked a strong blues tradition, a major city, and has remained caught up in ideals of nobility and Confederacy.
Do you want to be inspired?
Adam Phillips remains one of our most underrated thinkers:
However much we want inspiration, if it disturbs our normal sense of ourselves then we are going to resist it. Most people are not seeking self-knowledge; they believe – they live as if – they already know who they are. So self-knowledge in this sense is the enemy of inspiration, our best defence against this alien invasion. As in sex, we may long to lose our composure and self-control but there is one thing we desire even more, and that is not to. Self-knowledge protects us from inspiration; inspiration, like sexual desire, undoes us. For non-believers, inspiration is more like sexual desire than anything else; a fascination, a fear, and something we think of as having a secret solitary pleasure attached to it.
Read the whole thing. If you want to try one of his books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is the best place to start.
Speculative claims about Australia
Why do some countries keep all their people in a small number of large cities?
A good example of the relationship between climate variability and human population size is provided by Australia. It is unique among the larger nations in consisting of either very small settlements or large cities, for the middle-sized towns that predominate elsewhere in the world are almost entirely absent. This is a consequence of the cycle of drought and flood that has characterized the land from first settlement.
Small regional population centers have survived because they can batten down the hatches and endure drought, and large cities have also survived because they are integrated into the global economy. The resource networks of towns, however, are smaller than the region affected by climate variability, making them vulnerable to swings in income. Typically, what happens is that, as a drought progresses, the farm machinery dealership and and automotive dealership close down…When the drought finally breaks, these businesses do not return…instead people travel to larger centers to buy what they need, and in time end up moving there.
The Australian example shows that climate variability has in fact encouraged the formation of cities: Today it is the most urbanized nation on Earth.
That is from Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for the Earth. A few passages make me wince, such as the romanticization of 18th century Scottish highlanders, but mostly it is the best popular science book on its topic.
My IRT ("introspective regression techniques") support Flannery’s implicit prediction. Think about all that empty desert in Saudi Arabia, although I wonder why the rather wet Uppsala is so dull. Opinions? Do we see concentrated population in major cities where it is driest and where the weather is most variable? I don’t recall that Ades and Glaeser mention this factor, but surely it deserves more study.
GMU Law
My colleagues in GMUs school of law can be justly proud of how quickly their program has risen in the rankings. TaxProfBlog excerpts from a National Review article:
Mason vaulted from 71st place in 1995 to 41st in 2005 — an
impressive achievement given that these rankings tend to remain static
from year to year…To use a baseball metaphor, Manne was a scout who specialized in the
minor leagues. Whereas his competitors were obsessed with signing
big-name free agents in hot fields such as feminist legal theory, Manne
quietly assembled a team of undervalued unknowns. "If the market
discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good
opportunities for hiring conservatives," says Polsby. This is exactly
the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy
law-and-economics scholar to make… "Have you read Moneyball?" asks Todd
Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the
best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics
franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. "We’re
the Oakland A’s of the law-school world."
Especially interesting is that GMU is probably undervalued relative to its academic achievement.
[GMU] probably would do even better but for the particular ways U.S.
News calculates worth: Forty percent of a school’s ranking is based on
reputation, as determined by judges and lawyers (15 percent) and law
professors (25 percent). "If we had Dartmouth or Princeton’s name,"
says Polsby, picking two well-regarded schools that don’t have law
programs, "we’d be a top-20 school overnight." …Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas, has created
several ranking systems that rely entirely on objective criteria. It
might be said, for instance, that a school is only as good as its
students. The 75th-percentile LSAT score of Mason’s entering class in
the fall of 2005 was 166 — enough to tie it for 22nd best (with seven
other schools). It might also be said that a school is only as good as
its professors. To measure this, Leiter has created a "scholarly
impact" rating based on faculty per capita citations in scholarly
journals and books. On this scale, Mason ties for 23rd (with four other
schools). Then there’s the Social Science Research Network, which
counts the number of times faculty papers are downloaded from the
Internet; over the last twelve months, Mason professors rank
eleventh….
Paris advice
1. A few of the best restaurants are Pierre Gagnaire, Taillevent, Le Cinq, and perhaps Guy Savoy. Most critics might put Gagnaire as number one.
2. Michelin "two-forkers" are quite good, but you must book to get in. In general you can’t get a seat in a decent Parisian restaurant unless you either book or show up at opening. If you are wandering around looking for good food at 8:30 p.m., or for that matter 1 p.m., you are unlikely to do well.
3. In The Louvre, spend an hour in the Poussin room and also obsess over Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera.
4. In Musee d’Orsay, gaze at Courbet’s Origin of the World (sorry, I can’t link to the image on a family blog but do Google it) and Puis de Chavannes, in addition to the usual delights.
5. Go see the medieval tapestries at Musee Cluny.
6. Spend a few hours walking the main roads of the Left Bank. Start at Invalides and take the major arteries through to the Islamic Center. Walk, walk, walk.
7. Watch The Triplets of Belleville and spend hours walking through the (rapidly gentrifying) working-class neighborhoods of the Right Bank. The Metro is splendid but it robs you from seeing the greatest walking city on earth (Buenos Aires is number two). Don’t take it. Walk, walk, walk.
8. Go into a good cheese shop and spend $40. Focus on the weirder cheeses. Buy the non-pasteurized delights. Sit down with a baguette and some fruit as well, finishing the meal with small squares of outrageously priced dark chocolate. Throw in a sausage for good measure. Keep the cheese leftovers in your room at night and eat them for breakfast the next day. And the day after that. See how many days they will keep, you will be surprised.
9. Rue de Bussi and thereabouts has a convenient collection of cheese, fruit and bread shops, and it is in an excellent part of the Left Bank.
10. Internet Cafes are hard to come by. You must rely on the dumpy area near Centre de Pompidou. I find Paris to be the hardest city to blog from.
11. See a "world music" concert from Algeria, Madagascar, or the Congo. Or try contemporary music at IRCAM.
12. Here is my previous post My Favorite Things French. Douse yourself in Godard films before going. Start with Breathless, Band of Strangers, and My Life to Live.
13. If you want to read recent French social science (if you can call it that), try Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus. Don’t get too upset if these books only make intermittent sense. At least they are alive. For a recent hit novel, try Houllebecq’s The Elementary Particles.
Comments are open, and I encourage all of you but especially John Nye and Barkley Rosser — both Paris experts — to make a few suggestions for my friend.
Jonathan Amith
Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.
His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…"[Jonathan Amith] harkens back to the 19th century tradition of the
adventurer-scholar who says, "I’ll go out and do something and the
world be damned," says Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist
who studies Nahuatl-speakng villages.
For more, see the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal,
center column. By the way, tomato, coyote, avocado, and chocolate are all English words which came from Nahuatl. Nahuatl is the most beautiful language I have heard. Here is Jonathan’s web page. I think of Jonathan as an obsessive collector of words, in the best sense of that term. He is one of the most remarkable men I have met and his knowledge of the social sciences is phenomenal. Here are some MP3 files
of Jonathan’s linguistic work. Here is my book on the village, which also
profiles Jonathan. Comments are open, especially if you have a link to the article ("Scholar’s Dictionary of Aztec Language May Take a Lifetime," by Bob Davis); it should appear on-line at some point.
These caught my eye
Dan Akst on how best to spend a dollar to help the world. He suggests micro-finance as the most potent means of charity.
James Hamilton and Mark Thoma and Martin Feldstein on why higher oil prices have not created a recession.
Fatalities from sharks may be falling because people are fighting back and punching the sharks.
Here is a new book on how to fight back if the robots rebel. Hint: go for its "eyes" (cameras), punching is not the key. Don’t give them the security codes to your defense computers.
Why email communication is so problematic, and how we overrate how much others understand us in that medium.
Markets in everything, magazine edition, courtesy of Cynical-C blog.
Forbes magazine, short essays on money and happiness.
The Great American Novel — my runners-up
1. Faulkner. He came close to winning. But which novel? Absalom, Absalom is the deepest and richest. But you need to read it at least twice in a row, and that makes it less of a story. Here is the first page. As I Lay Dying is the most enjoyable. Read it through once, without trying to understand it. Then read it through voice-by-voice. Then read it through again. Sound and the Fury and Light in August (Faulkner’s easiest major work) cannot be dismissed either.
2. Henry James – The Golden Bowl. Are you interested in Girardian doubles, the triangulation of desire, self-deception, the use of gifts to imprison, the mediation of desire through objects, and the dynamics of marriages? This was James’s last and best novel. For my taste Portrait of a Lady is static and stands too close to the Merchant Ivory tradition. Interestingly, I believe not one of you mentioned James in the comments thread.
3. Huckleberry Finn. It seems more Shakespearian each time I read it. Right now Yana is reading it and loving it.
A few comments: Fitzgerald is not quite there. I am tempted to count Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a novel, not a poem. Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Nabokov’s Pale Fire are close, although my wife will not let me treat the latter as an American novel. Philip Roth has many excellent novels but no one for me stands out. Only the first third of Gravity’s Rainbow is wonderful. I prefer Hemingway’s short fiction and most of all his sociological non-fiction on bullfighting. Bellow is excellent but I wonder how much his books will mean to people one hundred years from now. The dark horses you already have heard about.
The Great American Novel — my pick
1. It must reward successive rereadings and get better each time.
2. It must be canonical and grip the imagination.
3. It must be linked to American history and letters in some essential way.
4. It must span the intellectual, the emotional, the religious, and the metaphysical.
5. It must be fun. You must be sad when the book is over, and wish it had been longer than it was.
6. It must be about a large white whale and have numerous Biblical allusions.
That leaves us with Moby Dick at the top.
The most indicative chapter for the book’s strangeness is "A Squeeze of the Hand." Has anyone done a better literary treatment of a homosexual ******-****, much less when writing about whale spermaceti? Excerpt:
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, – literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Here comes the best part:
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.
Get the picture? But do read the whole (short) chapter at the link, just in case you are confused about the context…
The method of the novel, if you can call it one, is madness. It is a collage of impressions, tales, facts about whaling, erotic interludes, and observations about social science. Occasionally the plot resurfaces but this can involve less rather than more tension. Moby Dick also can be read as pure commentary on the Bible or Shakespeare. Melville knew who his competitors were.
I’ve talked to many people who find the book offputting. Delve right in and embrace the strangeness. Take the ostensible masculinity and interpret it, and all the other foibles, as over-the-top. Dig out the implicit theology. Think of it as a new literary model. And best of all, read only one short chapter a day.
Tomorrow you get the near runners-up. Do feel free to offer your first place picks in the comments.
Mexico fact of the day
1.2 billion tortillas are consumed each day [TC: I believe that includes the tortillas consumed by pigs; surely the counting occurs on the production end].
That is from Lonely Planet Blue List, one of the most fun books for browsing and lists I have encountered. Imagine a travel provocateur in print form dedicated to helping you overcome your status quo biases. Highly recommended, and did you know that Serbia is right now one of the best countries in the world to visit?
The quest for the perfect Don Giovanni
It has comedy, drama, terror, and a sense of cosmic justice. Freedom and dread are intermingled. da Ponte’s libretto stands on its own; read Geoffrey Clive’s The Romantic Enlightenment for a good interpretation, or Kierkagaard’s Don Juan essay. Leporello and the Don are among the most memorable characters of literature. Don Giovanni might be the single most impressive, most magnificent, more comprehensive, and most complete piece of classical music (Bach’s Passions have a narrower emotional range, and no single Beethoven symphony compares). You simply must buy it, if you don’t own it already.
Yet I cannot find the perfect recorded version. Here are remarks on a few contenders:
1. Carlo Maria Giulini: This recording has splendid voices but the sound is muddy and the conducting is not always so sharp. I much prefer his Figaro.
2. Otto Klemperer: I had high hopes, since his Magic Flute is the best performance of that opera. But he is lugubrious with the Don and I find this one hard to get through. Otto’s Beethoven (the mono, odd-numbered symphonies and his Fidelio) and his Bach remain pinnacles.
3. Colin Davis: Perhaps the most evenly rounded version. More than adequate in every way. But it is not a first choice along any particular dimension. And I have never been a fan of Kiri Te Kanawa’s warbling. But if you want modern sound, this may be your best bet.
4. Georg Solti: As usual, too muscular and too much whiplash. His approach to the classics worked better live, and as the years recede, people will wonder what all the fuss was about.
5. von Karajan: Stiff, as was too often the case. He is best for music which needs some additional stiffness, such as Richard Strauss or Sibelius.
6. Charles Mackerras: I’ve never heard this one, but this conductor has been getting better as he ages. I might give it a shot someday.
7. Fritz Busch: It has the charm of age, but the performances are just not up to snuff. It remains the sentimental favorite of some people, but not deservedly so.
8. Claudio Abbado: At the time most of the serious reviews declared it a disappointment, so I never bought it. His recent Beethoven symphonies are gems.
9. Bernard Haitink: A good moderate pick, just as Davis is. Haitink is one of the most reliable and "buyable" conductors. Yet he has never developed a truly personal sound. A good introduction to the opera nonetheless.
10. Ferenc Fricsay. Nope.
11. Erich Leinsdorf. Double nope, and I won’t even give you an Amazon link.
12. John Eliot Gardiner: Better than you might have expected. It is short of first-rate vocalists, but the conductor’s musical intelligence elevates this. Gardiner is almost always better than you think he will be, and I mean that as a compliment.
13. Dmitri Mitropoulos: Fiery; it grabs you by the balls and doesn’t let go. Sloppy at times and not perfect. So-so live sound from 1956. At times this is my favorite Don. Cesare Siepi sings the lead role with abandon.
14. Wilhelm Furtwangler: Do not neglect the differences between the 1950, 1953, and 1954 Salzburg versions by Furtwangler. The link above is to the 1953 (only $18, plus you get part of Magic Flute). I have a 1954 on EMI, but no Amazon link for that one. Many people with better ears than I have prefer the 1953, which is supposed to be slightly more energetic. Either way you get Cesare Siepi as the Don, passionate conducting, and a celestial feeling throughout.
Recommended, as they say.
How many Don Giovannis must one hear?
Are bigger paintings better?
Believe it or not, some art lovers hold this to be a stupid question.
But not I. So consider a simple model and imagine the rest. You are an artist and you have better and worse ideas, as defined by either marketplace success or critical acclaim (or both). You can, to some degree, allocate your ideas across different size canvases. Some ideas only work well in the small, and some ideas only work well in the large, but still there is some flexibility. You are most likely to allocate your best ideas to the most saleable medium. And since larger pictures usually sell for more than smaller ones, why not put your better ideas into the larger pictures? You won’t waste a tremendous idea on a mere snippet of work, except perhaps as a practice or draft. The marginal revenue product (or "marginal critical acclaim product") will be higher for the bigger pictures. Of course we assume that the substitution effect outweighs the income effect. (Micro question: what assumptions about costs do we need? Does it suffice to assume that, given the cost of producing ideas, we can produce larger paintings at less than proportional cost? If you are Ellsworth Kelly, doubling the canvas size just isn’t that big a deal…)
There are caveats. If the picture is too large, and cannot hang above a sofa, perhaps it sells for less. So throw out monotonicity. You will put your best ideas into the most saleable medium, which does not always mean "bigger."
Longer songs are not better than shorter songs. I’ve never paid attention to all of "Nantucket Sleigh Ride." But the best songs will be close to around three minutes long, the dominant size or "medium" for hit songs. Songwriters and composers won’t put their best ideas into snippets. The best movies will be around two hours long, rather than a skit. Some artists will break these patterns for personal reasons; Peter Jackson wanted a three-hour King Kong for the (ha-ha) sake of the story. This may be a case of the income effect weighing in and financing self-indulgence.
Books should be better than short stories. Again, put your better ideas into the better-paying medium. Of course if customers use length as a signal of quality, these tendencies will be further strengthened. Intermediaries, such as networks, record companies, and your agent, will help enforce the constraints.
And how long are the best blog posts? The best comments to your wife? The best flirtations? The best comments on blog posts?
Thanks to Robin Hanson and Ilia Rainer for useful discussions of this point, and to Ilia for the question.