Anand Giridharadas of the NYT had a great piece the other day that comes up with as good a label for our historic era as I’ve seen: We are children of the Age of Metrics.

Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.

These services are wondrous. They also risk lumping us into clusters of the like-minded and depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.

Giridharadas goes on to question whether the overreliance on metrics winds up hurting our ability to reason in other ways–or even articulate other sorts of wisdom. So, it turns out, do the folks behind a new study commissioned by the French government looking at how policymaking decisions about things like foreign-aid spending are made.

But the commission’s solution was revealing of our times: not more balance between qualitative and quantitative, but more metrics: new statistics on human well-being and economic sustainability to contend with data on production.

The commission’s chairman, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of a forthcoming book, “Freefall,” on the Great Recession, has been a critic of the world’s saturation by business logic. I asked him what he made of metricocracy. He said metrics were valuable tools but were in danger of squelching other ways of perceiving. But he argued that his commission had no choice but to speak in metricese.

The same battle has been raging in less highfalutin realms, too. Like baseball. Michael Lewis’ classic Moneyball represented an ode to the metricians, making a hero of the Oakland A’s GM who managed to exploit various player resources that had been undervalued by traditional baseball wisdom. And, sure enough, Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August soon offered a riposte, praising the gut-calls of a veteran manager.

Currents – Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? – NYTimes.com.

My humble prediction: Within one year–at the outside–the following will be a ripped-from-the-headlines Law and Order episode:

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Police say a gang in the Peruvian jungle has been killing people and draining fat from the corpses to sell on the black market for use in cosmetics, although medical experts say they doubt a major market for fat exists.

Three suspects confessed to killing five people, but the gang may have been involved in dozens more, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said one suspect claimed the gang wasn’t the only one doing such killings.

Mejia said two of the suspects were arrested carrying bottles of liquid human fat and told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter). The fat was sold to intermediaries in Peru’s capital, Lima, and police suspect it was then sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, Mejia said Thursday, but he could not confirm any sales.

I’m actually sort of baffled that this hasn’t yet become a pop-culture phenomenon. All sorts of make-up has animal product in it, and now the prices here seem to imply that Peruvian beauticians have discovered the ultimate in age-defying fat: Man’s. Of course, while I don’t want to cast doubt on the professionalism of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police, I did have some questions. For one thing, the suspects that were busted with the bottles of liquid human fat. My own blubber, at least, is in solid form at room temperature. So was this suspect carrying extremely hot bottles? Or had the contents been adulterated in such a way as to give them a lower melting point?

Also, isn’t there an easier way to acquire human fat–say, from the back end of a liposuction procedure? Or is it that the fat of a dead body is somehow better when it comes to crows-feet erasure? The AP story quotes physicians expressing “doubt about an international black market for human fat, though it does have cosmetic applications.” But wouldn’t it be better to find someone from the cosmetics business to talk about whether such a market exists? The piece offers us a Yale dermatology professor who calls it “pure baloney” to think that human fat has some sort of superior cosmetic application. But don’t large chunks of the beauty industry demonstrate that people are willing to shell out for all sorts of things deemed “pure baloney” by (presumably wrinkly-faced) scientists?

Anyway, I’m waiting for the L&O version. I figure at the last minute, McCoy decides to not just prosecute the Peruvian trigger-man but to also throw the book at the super-rich, Upper East Side beauty-obsessed end-users.

The story ran above the fold on the front page of the Washington Post: “The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law.” Complete with quotes that seem as if they were focus-grouped for reasonableness (“The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular,” a church flack says. “For us, that’s really a problem.”), the ultimatum looked like a classic strategic leak–a scooplet slipped to reporters in the name of prodding government action.

It’s also an example of the idiocy that results when an organization dedicates its resources to the narrowest possible end. The political play for gay-marriage foes in this case is to rally downscale voters, presumably on the logic that this is an elitist cause which will now be seen to have actual harmful side-effects for the poor. A smart game, except for the fact that the vehicle by which the poor will be harmed is the church’s own ham-fisted retaliatory threat. This is blackmail, plain and simple. And my hunch is that it will be seen as such, and blow up in the Archdiocese’s face. (Indeed, the Post’s reaction story, tying the ultimatum to a hardening of the D.C. Council’s stance, suggests things aren’t going quite as the church planned).

For gay-marriage proponents, though, maybe the smarter response would be to take the diocese at its word. After all, the law wouldn’t force any church to perform same-sex marriages, or even to rent out its property for such affairs. But all organizations would have to obey city anti-discrimination laws. And that seems to be too much for the church, which fears it might be forbidden to deny people in same-sex, government-sanctioned, non-Catholic marriages the same benefits given to people in opposite-sex, government-recognized, non-Catholic marriages.

So the diocese, after all of that highfalutin talk about the sanctity of “faith teachings,” simply wants to be free to discriminate. So how about we let them. A carefully crafted bill might mollify this week’s concerns while also exposing the blackmailers for what they are: “Charitable groups shall henceforth be permitted to engage in job discrimination, personal mockery, or just tacky hostility based on race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, veteran’s status, political party, age, disability, or anything else they choose.” Since they’re throwing themselves into municipal politics, perhaps the diocese would care to embrace that law, too.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. On the show, none other than the First Lady of the United States will drop by to mark the occasion. In the press, the looming milestone has gotten the show more attention than it has in years, with anniversary-linked stories about Sesame Street’s global reach (booming), its domestic popularity (shaky), and its place in the hearts of the vast cohorts raised on the show’s touchy-feely pedagogy (secure).

I’ve had a lot of occasion to think again about Sesame Street recently, now that I have a child for whom Elmo represents both a surrogate babysitter and a gateway drug for television addiction. That puts me in a demographic whose very existence attests to Sesame Street’s old age: The group that’s now watching the show for the second time, as parents rather than as kids.

My return to the Street has generally been a sweet one. Like returnees to all sorts of real old neighborhoods, I’m heartened to find so much that’s the same: There’s Hooper’s Store, albeit under new management; there’s the fix-it shop; there are the trash cans and the front stoops and so many of the old neighborhood characters. Welcome Back, Oscar.

But maybe because it’s essentially the same, I find myself dwelling on what’s different. For oldsters, some of the changes are quite jarring. Snuffleupagus, for instance, has been outed: Once visible only to Big Bird, he’s been a normal character since the 80s, when producers apparently decided that the spectacle of grown-ups not believing Big Bird’s stories might keep actual kids from confiding important things to adults. Thus did a recurring anxiety of my childhood–oh, how they laughed at Big Bird whenever he talked about this “friend”–get banished.

Other changes are merely confusing. One of my friends, father of a toddler around my daughter’s age, pointed out to me recently that, even though Ernie and his rubber duckie remain stars, Bert seems to have vanished, like an out-of-favor Soviet politburo member. What gives?

The really bizarre thing for Thirtysomethings returning to Sesame Street, though, has nothing to do with the characters or the story lines. It’s purely contextual.

Back when the show was born, one of its major ambitions was to serve as a kind of uplift for the sort of kids who didn’t show up on The Brady Bunch. The cast was multiethnic. The setting was urban. Even for kids who grew up in quasi-suburbia, that was part of its magical appeal: It took the sort of Safeway-deprived neighborhood that all of America was abandoning and made it into a wonderland of sweet neighbors and valuable lessons and appropriately-themed festivals.

Forty years on, the magic still crackles, but for a different reason, as my daughter takes in a show. I suspect that doesn’t look to her like a tough neighborhood up on her TV, and not just because the graffiti got painted over during a post-1980 set redesign. Seriously: Look at those brownstones! That cute corner store! The foot traffic, for heaven’s sake! This isn’t a neighborhood all of America is abandoning. No, it’s a neighborhood her parents could never afford.

Instead, here’s the magic of early-21st century version: In this happy neighborhood, Gordon and Luis have managed to avoid getting themselves gentrified out to some distant patch of Rockland County, and even the fix-it store–I mean, who fixes things anymore?–has managed to avoid losing its lease to Starbucks. And thus can the assorted kids and muppets experience another generation of those aforementioned lessons and festivals and sweet neighborly interactions. Magic!

What this really suggests is that the cultural image of urban life has shifted, at least a bit. It’s not pure dysfunction anymore. In at least some places, life is so commodious for young folks–whose soccer-playing, tree-climbing childhoods parents once moved to the ‘burbs to ensure–that the market is effectively off-limits to all but the Bugaboo-propelled among Sesame Street’s audience. (Side note: When was the last time, other than in Major League Baseball’s embarassingly cheese Reviving Baseball in Inner-Cities tv spots, that you heard anyone use that term as a euphemism for poor and minority).

Did Sesame Street hasten this change? Who knows–my hunch is that gas prices, traffic, sprawl, and immigration will continue to revive cities, both in real life and in popular culture. If the Children’s Television Workshop wants to make a new uplift show aimed at those kids whose lives have been erased from mainstream TV, perhaps they should set it in an inner-ring suburb somewhere.

On the other hand, the cultural evolution between when I watched Sesame Street and when my daughter began watching it has been both fast and unexpected. What will Hooper’s store symbolize by the time my daughter parks my grandchild in front of Sesame Street? I have a feeling we’ll eventually find out.

It’s the day after a minor midterm! Which means:

Vast, self-interested overinterpretations of the results, often by people who ought to know better (and probably do)

versus

Accurate, if equally self-interested, preemptive responses to said overinterpretations.

There are times, and the day after an election is one of them, when the blogosphere ceases to be a useful place for political opinion: It descends to a scrub between unspinnable people seeking nonetheless to spin one another, or at least shape the spin that’ll be produced by some other realm of the media that’s consumed by those undecided, uncommitted voter types that none of us in the hot air business actually know.

My head hurts.