In response to the trouble at Fannie Mae — its stock plunged — we have this:

“There is a sort of a panic going on and that’s not what ought to be,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Senate banking committee. “The facts don’t warrant that reaction, in my view.”

Mr. Dodd said that he was persuaded by conversations with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke that the two companies “are fundamentally sound and strong.”

Nassim Taleb begs to differ — a year ago:

The government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.”

A footnote on p. 226 of The Black Swan, published April 2007. Asked to comment on the Fannie Mae situation, Taleb replied, “I discuss events before, not after. I despise postdicters.”

1. At Writers With Drinks I met a woman who is writing a memoir. Since I had actually published a book, she wondered if I had any advice about finding a publisher. I said don’t get your hopes up. Practically no one makes anything resembling a living from writing books. (I meant books like memoirs — what a friend calls real books.) It’s a hobby. I asked her if she’d heard this before. No, she said. She said she’s around people who are “positive” whereas I was “realistic.”

2. My friend Phil Price is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A few years ago he wrote a chapter (“”Assessing uncertainties in the relationship between inhaled particle concentrations, internal deposition, and health effects”) for a handbook-like compendium. It was a big mistake, he said. There were three problems: 1. It was much harder to write than he expected. 2. The quality of the final product was lower than he expected. 3. The audience was tiny. Maybe 11 people would end up reading what he’d written.

From a review of Kathryn Harrison’s new book While They Slept, about a boy who murders his parents:

When Billy Gilley is 13, stealing cigarettes leads him to the Children’s Services Division, where the boy trustingly told a social worker about his family: the drinking, fighting, extreme verbal abuse in a family where customarily, after sentencing by his mother, his father would tie him to a tractor tire in order to immobilize him for beating with a rubber hose. He described for the social worker how his parents were, in Billy’s terms, “crazy and unfit.”

The child told his story, and the social worker’s response was to repeat it to those abusive parents. Furious, they demanded to speak with him in private, so that he recanted and said he had been lying. The parents threatened to sue the agency, which fired the social worker and destroyed the record of her conversation with Billy, leaving only the annotation that the child was a liar. . . .Having acquired literacy skills in prison, he writes and illustrates children’s books. In these books, large-eyed animals play an important role: children are in trouble or distress, and human adults cannot understand or help. The animals understand the children, and bring them to safety.

This reminds me of two things. Many years ago, such as in the 1920s, cancer was a terrible thing and a total mystery. People didn’t like to talk about it. Likewise the social worker’s actions are a terrible thing and a total mystery. What should be done about such behavior? Nobody wants to talk about it. The other thing this reminds me of is the Ten Commandments. Here is something else no one talks about: There is no commandment against child abuse. No stealing: yes. No murder: yes. No adultery: yes. No child abuse: no. Stealing is worse than child abuse? Huh?

Well, at least the review is titled “Speaking the Unspeakable.”

About ten years ago Haruki Murakami, the author, gave a talk at UC Berkeley. in which he said he had decided to try to become a writer during a baseball game — specifically, when someone hit a single to left field. I told this story as often as possible. My listeners were always puzzled. It made no sense. Was he kidding?

Now Murakami has told the story in print. Turns out it was a double, not a single. And I missed another crucial detail. Murakami was a “fairly devoted Yakult Swallows fan.” It was the Swallows lead-off batter who hit the double. Now the story makes sense. Something wonderful had just happened on the field. Surprising, too. Wonderful unpredictable things happen, Murakami realized. They could happen to him. “Something flew down from the sky at that instant,” he wrote, “and, whatever it was, I accepted it.”