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“Kesey Runs Laughing After The Tractor”

February 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In 1976, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened to tremendous critical acclaim, but author Ken Kesey, who adapted his own novel for the film version, felt ripped off financially and planned on suing the film’s producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Kesey was simultaneously having a feud with Whole Earth Catalog legend Stewart Brand. From John Riley’s People profile from that year about the litigious writer who was at the time running his own cattle farm in Oregon:

In 1959, at a VA hospital in California, Kesey volunteered as a subject for early unpublicized experiments on the effects of LSD. That experience, plus a subsequent job there as night attendant in a psychiatric ward, enabled him to write convincingly about the fictional Randle McMurphy and the other cuckoos nesting in the pages of his first novel.

A more celebrated brush with bedlam was Kesey’s life with the Merry Pranksters—the name given a group of young drug-takers he teamed up with in the mid-’60s. In the Pranksters’ short-circuited philosophy of life, a person was “either on the bus or off the bus”—a doper or a drag. No one was more emphatically “on the bus” than Kesey himself, who owned the actual 1939 International Harvester vehicle in which the Pranksters tripped across the U.S.A. (Tom Wolfe described the bizarre journey of these psychedelic sharpshooters in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

But things change. These days Kesey, now 40, has turned from raising Cain to raising cattle and is a member of the PTA in Pleasant Hill, a small farming community five miles from Eugene.

A recent visitor finds Kesey, in greasy coveralls, heaving bales of hay to his 30 head of beef. One, a crazy Angus steer named Sonofabitch, has broken through a casually constructed fence to reach the lush grass near some blueberry bushes. Soon the animal returns, bawling, and farmer Kesey watches the bucolic scene with apparent contentment. He signals his 9-year-old daughter, Sunshine, to drive the Ford tractor back toward the converted red barn that is their home. He chases down a calf named Frivol. Then, cradling the long-legged creature in his powerful arms, Kesey runs laughing after the tractor.•

 

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“Two Decades On The Size Of The Audience For The Literary Novel Will Be About The Size Of The Group Who Read Latin Poetry”

February 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I’m starting to believe that Philip Roth is serious about his retirement from writing novels. Of course, he’s spoken recently about how he feels the novel itself is “retiring.” It’s kind of difficult to argue based on the evidence, based on how much storytelling has changed, how much more it will likely soon change. I still hold out hope, still think words will be everywhere. Maybe careers won’t be literary anymore, but I believe there will still be literature of high quality. The opening of Alison Flood’s new Guardian piece about the great novelist in (at least) repose:

A happily retired Philip Roth is spending his days swimming, watching baseball and nature-spotting, revelling in the fact that ‘there’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction,’ according to a new interview.

Reiterating his bleak view about the future of literature – that ‘two decades on the size of the audience for the literary novel will be about the size of the group who read Latin poetry’ – the 80-year-old Roth told Stanford scholar Cynthia Haven that his disengagement from the world of writing is still very much in evidence. Asked by Haven if he really believes his talent – which has won him the Man Booker International prize and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel – will ‘let [him] quit’ writing, Roth responded: ‘You better believe me, because I haven’t written a word of fiction since 2009.’

‘I have no desire to write fiction,’ said the Pulitzer prize-winning literary giant. ‘I did what I did and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.’

Instead: ‘I swim, I follow baseball, look at the scenery, watch a few movies, listen to music, eat well and see friends. In the country I am keen on nature.’

He is also studying 19-century American history.•

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“Behind The Curtain Of Empire, Horrors Lurk”

February 3, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Private zoos have always been a strange beast, and some Animal Planet enthusiasts now oddly invite the elephant into the living room (scroll down to second item), but one menagerie faced a far crazier time during Japan’s Great Zoo Massacre of WWII. The opening of “Bambi and Tong Tong,” Julia Adeney Thomas’ Times Literary Supplement review of a new book about understanding the psychology and politics of the horror: 

“Behind the curtain of empire, horrors lurk. At the Tokyo Imperial Zoo on September 4, 1943, two starving elephants remained silent, obedient to their trainers, while a religious service on the other side of a red-and-white awning prematurely memorialized their sacrifice for Japan’s imperial cause. Buddhist monks, government officials and schoolchildren made offerings of food to the elephants’ spirits and to the spirits of other captive animals killed by order of the government. This unprecedented ceremony known as the ‘Memorial Service for Martyred Animals’ was held on the zoo’s grounds where nearly a third of the cages stood empty. Lions from Abyssinia, tigers representative of Japan’s troops, bears from Manchuria, Malaya and Korea, an American bison, and many others had been clubbed, speared, poisoned and hacked to death in secret. Although the zoo’s director had found a way to save some of the condemned creatures by moving them to zoos outside Tokyo, Mayor Ōdaichi Shigeo insisted on their slaughter. Ōdaichi himself, along with Imperial Prince Takatsukasa Nobusuke and the chief abbot of Asakusa’s Sensōji Temple, presided over the carefully choreographed and highly publicized ‘Memorial Service,’ thanking the animals for sacrificing themselves for Japan’s war effort.

But the elephants were not dead.”

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Old Print Article: “Death Of Eccentric Old Dr. Gruby” (1898)

February 2, 2014 in Books, Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You know the story about the Paris-based celebrity doctor who liked to prescribe sauerkraut, was Alexandre Dumas’ personal physician and kept a vicious pet monkey? No? Well, here it is, courtesy of the December 18, 1898 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Paris Bureau–All capitals contain so great a number of eccentric people that if we knew them all, we would still more readily come to the conclusion that there are more mad people outside than inside insane asylums.

It is probable the Paris does not contain as many as London, for it is known that for oddity and originality the English have the precedence; but such specimens as Dr. Gruby show that if the number is not as large as in Paris as in London, they, at least, are quite as capable to do as eccentric things and lead as eccentric lives.

Dr. Gruby was a physician who possessed all of the necessary diplomas, but he was called a healer. This country, like all other countries, in fact, is flooded with healers. Legitimate doctors do all in their power to bring them into disfavor, but vox populi is vox dei, and the more eccentric the healer seems to be and the more extraordinary his cures appear to the patients, the more they knock at his door to be healed.

“Alexandre Dumas would have no other doctor.”

There is not a French celebrity of any kind, within the last forty years, who, afflicted with any serious illness, has not gone to Dr. Gruby, and who was not dumbfounded when the healer prescribed carrots, sauerkraut or some other unheard of medicament with the grave countenance of a doctor who writes down the most complicated mixtures in an incomprehensible page of Latin words.

But faith was there. Had the healer not made the most remarkable cures? Were not such men as Alexandre Dumas and Ambroise Thomas there to testify that whatever surprising things the healer gave, they, one and all, were benefited by it?

He did not reserve all his oddities for his patients; he kept a great number for his own actions and behavior. One of them was that he never wanted to appear but in the best of health to all humanity, his servants included. He died at the age of 80, behind a locked door. He did not even admit his servants during his last two days of agony. He died in a dark room, without a streak of light, for he feared some curious eye might see him in the throes of death. At last the scared servants had the door forced open by the commissaire de police and they found but a cold corpse. The healer had drawn his last breath about twelve hours before.

Not so long ago, Mme. Ambroise Thomas was asked to tell us some eccentricities of the doctor. “Alexandre Dumas would have no other doctor, and for a long while, by the orders of Dr. Gruby, Dumas would start off on a morning constitutional with four apples in his pocket. The orders were to walk from the Avenue de Villiens to the Arch of Triumph and there stop to eat an apple; then to start again and walk to the Place de la Concorde, and stop there and eat another apple. He was to return to the Arch and eat his third apple, and take the fourth before his own door and have the last bite in his mouth before he crossed the threshold.

“And Dr. Gruby’s servants were allowed to be visible only at certain hours. He was passionately fond of animals and plants. He had dogs and cats and for a long time possessed a vicious monkey whom he called his brother, and who bit several of his friends.”•

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“The Absurd Hilarity Of The Situation Had Never Quite Stopped Haunting The Director”

February 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Excerpts from two articles about Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which is one of the greatest films ever made, yet only my fourth or fifth favorite Stanley Kubrick movie, which shows you how highly I rank his work. It’s as perfect now as it was when released 50 years ago, as timeless as Patton or Duck Soup. In fact, it’s Patton *as* Duck Soup. It’s tremendously funny yet no laughing matter.

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From “Doctor’s Orders,” Bilge Elbiri’s 2009 Moving Image Source article explaining how a very serious novel became a Kubrick comedy:

After their initial drafts, Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris, with whom he had made The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Lolita, workshopped the script (then called The Delicate Balance of Terror) in New York. “They’d stay up late into the night cracking up over it, overcome by their impulse towards gallows humor,” says Mick Broderick, the author of Nuclear Movies and an extensive forthcoming study of Strangelove. Harris would soon leave to forge his own directorial career (his admirably tense 1965 directorial debut, The Bedford Incident, concerns a confrontation between an American destroyer and a Soviet submarine). But when Kubrick later called his former partner to tell him that he had decided to turn Delicate Balance into an actual comedy, Harris was skeptical, to say the least. “He thought, ‘The kid’s gonna destroy his career!’” says Broderick.

The absurd hilarity of the situation had never quite stopped haunting the director, as he and George continued to work on the film. It wasn’t so much the premise of the Red Alert story as everything Kubrick was learning about the thinking behind thermonuclear strategy. The director, even then notorious for thorough research, had become friendly with a number of scientists and thinkers on the subject, some with George’s help, including the notorious RAND strategist Herman Kahn, who would talk with a straight face about “megadeaths,” a word he had coined in the 1950s to describe one million deaths. As Kubrick told Joseph Heller:

Incongruity is certainly one of the sources of laughter—the incongruity of sitting in a room talking to somebody who has a big chart on the wall that says “tragic but distinguishable postwar environments’ and that says ‘one to ten million killed.” …There is something so absurd and unreal about what you’re talking about that it’s almost impossible to take it seriously.•

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From “Almost Everything in Dr. Strangelove Was True,” a New Yorker blog post about the scary reality that informed the nervous laughter, by Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control:

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although Strangelove was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When Fail-Safe—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in Fail-Safe are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.•

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“I’m Sort Of A Techno-Geek, Propeller-Head, Science-Fiction Type”

January 31, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Three quick exchanges from Erik Lundegaard’s 1996 interview with then-fledgling Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, when Amazon was merely books, and delivery drones and Washington Post ownership were most certainly not in the offing.

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Question:

So how did you come up with the idea for this company?

Jeff Bezos:

… I looked at several different areas and finally decided that one of the most promising ones is interactive retailing. Then I made a list of 20 products, and force-ranked them, looking for the first-best product to sell on-line.

Original logo for amazon.comIn the top five were things like magazine subscriptions, computer hardware, computer software, and music. The reason books really stood out is because there are so many books. Books are totally unusual in that respect—to have so many items in a particular category. There are one and a half million English-language books, different titles, active and in-print at any given time. There are three million titles active and in-print worldwide in all languages. If you look at the number two category in that respect, it’s music, and there are only about 200 thousand active music CDs. Now when you have a huge number of items that’s where computers start to shine because of their sorting and searching and organizing capabilities. Also, it’s back to this idea that you have to have an incredibly strong value proposition. With that many items, you can build a store on-line that literally could not exist in any other way. It would be impossible to have a physical bookstore with 1.5 million titles. The largest physical bookstores in the world only have about 175,000 titles. It would also be impossible to print the amazon.com catalogue and make it into a paper catalogue. If you were to print the amazon.com catalogue it would be the size of seven New York City phone books.

So here we’re offering a service that literally can’t be done in any other way, and, because of that, people are willing to put up with this infant technology.

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Question:

 Do you have a favorite book?

Jeff Bezos:

It used to be Dune. I’m sort of a techno-geek, propeller-head, science-fiction type, but my wife got me to read Remains of the Day and I liked that a lot. I also like the Penguin edition of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s biography

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Question:

How will all of this affect physical bookstores?

Jeff Bezos:

I think you’ll see a continuation of the trend that’s already in place, which is that physical bookstores are going to compete by becoming better places to be. They’ll have better lattes, better sofas, all this stuff. More comfortable environments. I still buy about half of my books from physical bookstores and one of the big reasons is I like being in bookstores. It’s just like TV didn’t put the movies out of business—people still like to go to the movie theater, they like to mingle with their fellow humans—and that’s going to continue to be the case. Good physical bookstores are like the community centers of the late 20th century. Good physical bookstores have great authors come in and you can meet them and shake their hands, and that’s a different thing. You can’t duplicate that on-line.

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“He Put Something Out There That Was Terribly Appealing To Those Of Us Who Were Certainly A Little Naive”

January 30, 2014 in Books, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vanity Fair journalist Nina Munk is this week’s guest on a very good EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts. Munk wrote a 2007 article, “Jeffrey Sachs’ $200 Billion Dream,” which looked at the passion and plans of the End of Poverty author. She then decided to follow Sachs’ work in a long-term way, and things got complicated.

If Munk didn’t exactly come to praise the economist, she didn’t think she would end up burying him–but that’s pretty much what happened. Her resulting book on the topic, The Idealist, is a story of good intentions run aground as it pertains to the Sachsian method of sustainable development in impoverished African communities. Munk acknowledges the Millennium Villages Project isn’t an abject failure as a charity, but believes it isn’t a success in its stated aspiration to find a poverty-fighting formula. Munk doesn’t seem to be attempting to demonize anyone (although she does accuse Sachs of “emotional blackmail”) but is trying to make sense of the naivete and folly and mistakes.

I like Roberts, though I find self-serving his suggestion that idealists who try and fail are crueler than Libertarians who oppose activism. 

Listen here and read a Vanity Fair Q&A about the book here. See some excerpts from Sachs’ recent Ask Me Anything at Reddit.

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“[Perhaps] Intelligent Machines Will Come To The Conclusion That Sex Is The Best Way For Them To Evolve”

January 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating a degree beyond the idea of self-replicating machines, George Zarkadakis of the Telegraph wonders whether robots will eventually pair off and hook up, whether the future of “life” will be determined by sexed machines. From his article:

“Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes.

Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called ‘genetic algorithms’ that mimic evolution.

Nanotechnologists, like Eric Drexler, see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – like in Lem’s novel – come together to form intelligent superorganisms. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon- and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce. Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species.

If that is the future, then we may have to reread Paley’s Natural Theology and take notice. Not in the way that creationists do, but as members of an open society that must face up to the possible ramifications of our technology. Unlike natural evolution, where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved late as by-products of cerebral development in mammals, in robotic evolution intelligence will be the guiding force. Butler will be vindicated. Brains will come before bodies. Robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. The question is not whether it may happen or not, but whether we would want it to happen.”

 

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Old Print Article: “Mark Twain Is Dead At 74,” New York Times (1910)

January 30, 2014 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

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“His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise.”

Mark Twain, jester and debunker and literary giant, showed you could leave an impression, a mark, on American life and letters even if you weren’t as scarred as Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, even if your first impulse was to go for the joke. He saw things as they were and tried to make us all see them a little differently, and in that he succeeded. No matter who comes after, he will always really be the country’s king of comedy. The opening of his obituary in the April 22, 1910 New York Times:

“Danbury, Conn., April 21 — Samuel Langhorne Clemens, ‘Mark Twain,’ died at 22 minutes after 6 tonight. Beside him on the bed lay a beloved book- it was Carlyle’s French Revolution-and near the book his glasses, pushed away with a weary sigh a few hours before. Too weak to speak clearly, ‘Give me my glasses,’ he had written on a piece of paper. He had received them, put them down, and sunk into unconsciousness from which he glided almost imperceptibly into death. He was in his seventy-fifth year.

For some time, his daughter Clara and her husband, Ossip Cabrilowitsch, and the humorist’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, had been by the bed waiting for the end, which Drs. Quintard and Halsey had seen to be a matter of minutes. The patient felt absolutely no pain at the end and the moment of his death was scarcely noticeable.

Death came, however, while his favorite niece, Mrs. E. E. Looms, and her husband, who is Vice President of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railway, and a nephew, Jervis Langdon, were on the way to the railroad station. They had left the house much encouraged by the fact that the sick man had recognized them, and took a train for New York ignorant of what happened later.

Hopes Aroused Yesterday

Although the end had been foreseen by the doctors and would not have been a shock at any time, the apparently strong rally of this morning had given basis for the hope that it would be postponed for several days. Mr. Clemens awoke at about 4 o’clock this morning after a few hours of the first natural sleep he has had for several days, and the nurses could see by the brightness of his eyes that his vitality had been considerably restored. He was able to raise his arms above his head and clasp them behind his neck with the first evidence of physical comfort he had given for a long time.

His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise, the first signs of which he could see out of the windows in the three sides of the room where he lay. The increasing sunlight seemed to bring ease to him, and by the time the family was about he was strong enough to sit up in bed and overjoyed them by recognizing all of them and speaking a few words to each. This was the first time that his mental powers had been fully his for nearly two days, with the exception of a few minutes early last evening, when he addressed a few sentences to his daughter.

Calls for His Book

For two hours he lay in bed enjoying the feeling of this return of strength. Then he made a movement asked in a faint voice for the copy of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which he has always had near him for the last year, and which he has read and re-read and brooded over.

The book was handed to him, and he lifted it up as if to read. Then a smile faintly illuminated his face when he realized that he was trying to read without his glasses. He tried to say, ‘Given me my glasses,’ but his voice failed, and the nurses bending over him could not understand. He motioned for a sheet of paper and a pencil, and wrote what he could not say.

With his glasses on he read a little and then slowly put the book down with a sigh. Soon he appeared to become drowsy and settled on his pillow. Gradually he sank and settled into a lethargy. Dr. Halsey appreciated that he could have been roused, but considered it better for him to rest. At 3 o’clock he went into complete unconsciousness.

Later Dr. Quintard, who had arrived from New York, held a consultation with Dr. Halsey, and it was decided that death was near. The family was called and gathered about the bedside watching in a silence which was long unbroken. It was the end. At twenty-two minutes past 6, with the sunlight just turning red as it stole into the window in perfect silence he breathed his last.

Died of a Broken Heart

The people of Redding, Bethel, and Danbury listened when they were told that the doctors said Mark Twain was dying of angina pectoris. But they say among themselves that he died of a broken heart. And this is a verdict not of popular sentiment alone. Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the last year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life. When Richard Watson Gilder died, he said: ‘How fortunate he is. No good fortune of that kind ever comes to me.’

The man who has stood to the public for the greatest humorist this country has produced has in private life suffered overwhelming sorrows. The loss of an only son in infancy, a daughter in her teens and one in middle life, and finally of a wife who was a constant and sympathetic companion, has preyed upon his mind. The recent loss of his daughter Jean, who was closest to him in later years when her sister was abroad studying, was the final blow. On the heels of this came the first symptoms of the disease which was surely to be fatal and one of whose accompaniments is mental depression. Mr. Paine says that all heart went out of him and his work when his daughter Jean died. He has practically written nothing since he summoned his energies to write a last chapter memorial of her for his autobiography.”

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“The Mood Organ Is A Device That Allows The User To Dial A Code To Instantly Be In A Certain Mood”

January 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oh, I have trouble reading science fiction. The ideas are interesting, but the actual writing usually leaves me cold. There are some exceptions, of course, as there always are in life, but I doubt I’ll even have a period in which I dive deeply into the genre. Rebecca J. Rosen of the Atlantic has an interview with Dan Novy and Sophia Bruckner of MIT who are going to be teaching a course “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication.” A passage from the Q&A about one of the exceptions, Philip K. Dick:

“Rebecca J. Rosen:

What are some specific examples you’ll be looking at?

Sophia Bruckner:

For example, we will be reading the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, who is one of my favorite authors and is a master of crazy gadget ideas. The devices he describes in his writings can be very humorous and satirical but are truly profound. People have probably seen Blade Runner, an excellent movie based on this book, but the book is very different! Many of the most compelling devices from the book did not make it into the movie.

For example, the Mood Organ is a device that allows the user to dial a code to instantly be in a certain mood. The book contains multiple funny instances of people using this device, such as when one character plugs in the code 888 to feel ‘the desire to watch TV no matter what is on,’ but Dick also points out some disturbing implications resulting from the existence of such a technology. ‘How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?’ asks one character. Should you be happy and energized to work all the time? This character eventually concludes that two days a month is a reasonable amount for feeling despair. Today, we are hoping science and technology will find the secret to forever happiness, but what will happen if we actually succeed?

Another one of my favorite gadgets from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the Empathy Box. A person holds the handles on the Empathy Box and is connected with all other people using it at the same time by sharing the feelings of a spiritual figure named William Mercer. Amazingly, even in 1968, Dick saw the potential for technology to not only connect people across long distances but to do so with emotional depth. Dick writes that the Empathy Box is ‘the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.’

Actually, I just realized while answering this question that I’ve been attempting to build a version of the Empathy Box as part of my thesis! I believe people crave for their computers and phones to fulfill this need for connection, but they manage to do so only superficially. As a result, people feel increasingly estranged and alone despite being connected all the time. Like Dick, I also am intrigued by how to use technology to promote empathy and a greater sense of genuine interconnectedness with one another, and I am currently working on designing wearable devices to do this. Some of my best ideas stem from reading science fiction, and I often don’t realize it until later!'”

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“Instead Of Studying Caves, You Ended Up Studying Time”

January 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just read psychologist Adam Alter’s 2013 book, Drunk Tank Pink, which I really enjoyed even if some of the historical material he presents is well-worn. (Oh, and even though I think the connection the author draws between Usain Bolt’s surname and his career success is overstated. Jamaican steering committees responded to those fast-twitch leg muscles and stop-watch times, not his thunderous “title.”) A brief passage in the section about social isolation discusses the experience of French speleologist Michel Siffre who insinuated himself into the Space Race in the 1960s by conducting extreme self-deprivation experiments, in an attempt to anticipate how such conditions would effect astronauts. In 1962, Siffre lived within the solitude of an underground glacier to test the effect on his mental faculties. The following decade, he spent 205 days alone in a Texas cave. A Cousteau who does not get wet, Siffre has dived so deep inside of himself that time has seemed to cease.

Alter’s writing reminded me of a 2008 Cabinet interview that Joshua Foer, that memory enthusiast, conducted with the time-isolation explorer. The opening:

“Joshua Foer:

In 1962, you were just twenty-three years old. What made you decide to live underground in complete isolation for sixty-three days?

Michel Siffre:

You have to understand, I was a geologist by training. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition, and to spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I said to myself, “Well, fifteen days is not enough. I shall see nothing.” So, I decided to stay two months. And then this idea came to me—this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.

Joshua Foer:

Instead of studying caves, you ended up studying time.

Michel Siffre:

Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn’t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn’t have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology. Long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, have a body clock as well.”

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“In America, A Thriller, Or A Mystery Story As We Call Them, Is Slightly Below The Salt”

January 25, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Woe the American genre writers of days of yore, forced to be contented with handsome paychecks that were uncoupled from the respect afforded their “serious” counterparts, often their lessers. In our time, perhaps things have swung too far in the other direction, with comic-book heroes, zombies and the such more highly valued than ever. It sure feels like a bubble. Maybe those in the future will strike the right balance.

The opening of a 1958 BBC conversation between two masters of genre, Ian Fleming, birther of Bond, and Raymond Chandler, dark poet of Los Angeles:

“Ian Fleming:

Well, the first thing, really, is to define what we’re supposed to be talking about. I think the title of what we’re supposed to be talking about is English and American thrillers. What is a thriller? To my mind of course, you don’t write thrillers and I do.

Raymond Chandler:

I do too.

Ian Fleming:

I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.

Raymond Chandler:

A lot of people call them thrillers.

Ian Fleming:

I know. I think it’s wrong.

Raymond Chandler:

Oh, well I . . .

Ian Fleming:

I mean, you write novels of suspense like Simenon does and like Eric Ambler does perhaps, but in which violence is the background, just as love might be in the background of the ordinary or the straight kind of novel . . .

Raymond Chandler:

Well, in America, a thriller, or a mystery story as we call them, is slightly below the salt.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, thriller writing is very below the salt really . . .

Raymond Chandler:

You can write a long, very lousy historical novel full of sex and it can be a bestseller and be treated respectfully. But a very good thriller writer, who writes far, far better, just gets a little paragraph of course.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, I know. That’s very true.

Raymond Chandler:

Mostly. There’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.”•

______________

The audio version:

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“I Suspect That War Will Become Obsolete Only When Something Worse Supercedes It”

January 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve not read much sci-fi, so I’m not very familiar with The Forever War author Joe Haldeman. In a new new Wired podcast, the writer and Vietnam Vet shares his thoughts about warfare in this age of miracles and wonders, when science and science fiction are difficult to entangle. An excerpt:

“‘I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it,’ says Joe Haldeman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. ‘I’m thinking in terms of weapons that don’t look like weapons. I’m thinking of ways you could win a war without obviously declaring war in the first place.’

Increasingly sophisticated biological and nanotech weapons are one direction war might go, he says, along with advanced forms of propaganda and mind control that would persuade enemy soldiers to switch sides or compel foreign governments to accede to their rivals’ demands. It’s a prospect he finds chilling.

‘One hopes that they’ll never be able to use mind control weapons,’ says Haldeman, ‘because we’re all done for if that happens. I don’t want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.'”

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“I Realize That Computers Are In Their Infancy, But They’re Pretty Pathetic”

January 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1987, when Omni asked Bill Gates and Timothy Leary to predict the future of tech and Robert Heilbroner to speculate on the next phase of economics, David Byrne was asked to prognosticate about the arts two decades hence. It depends on how you parse certain words, but Byrne got a lot right–more channels, narrowcasting, etc. One thing I think he erred on is just how democratized it all would become. “I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict, Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway.” Kim and Snooki and cats at piano would not have been making art anyway. Certainly you can argue that reality television, home-made Youtube videos and fan fiction aren’t art in the traditional sense, but I would disagree. Reality TV and the such holds no interest for me on the granular level, but the decentralization of media, the unloosing of the cord, is as fascinating to me as anything right now. It’s art writ large, a paradigm shift we have never known before. It’s democracy. The excerpt:

“David Byrne, Lead Singer, Talking Heads:

The line between so-called serious and popular art will blur even more than it already has because people’s altitudes are changing. When organized religion began to lose touch with new ideas and discoveries, it started failing to accomplish its purpose in people’s lives. More and more people will turn to the arts tor the kind of support and inspiration religion used to of- fer them. The large pop-art audience remains receptive to the serious content they’re not getting from religion. Eventually some new kind of formula — an equivalent of religion — will emerge and encompass art, physics, psychiatry, and genetic engineering without denying evolution or any of the possible cosmologies.

I think that people have exaggerated greatly the effects new technology has on the arts and on the number of people who will make art in the future. I realize that computers are in their infancy, but they’re pretty pathetic, and I’m not the only one who’s said that. Computers won’t take into account nuances or vagueness or presumptions or anything like intuition.

I don’t think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they’re just big or small adding machines. And if they can’t ‘think,’ that’s all they’ll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won’t help in the creative process.

The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people’s attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done on television, a perfect medium for them. But I don’t think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.

Outlets for art, in the marketplace and on television, will multiply and spread. Even the three big TV networks will feature looser, more specialized programming to appeal to special-interest groups. The networks will be freed from the need to try to please everybody, which they do now and inevitably end up with a show so stupid nobody likes it. Obviously this multiplication of outlets will benefit the arts.

I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict. Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway. Still, I definitely think that the general public will be interested in art that was once considered avant-garde.

I can’t stand the cult of personality in pop music. I don’t know if that will disappear in the next 20 years, but I hope we see a healthier balance between that phenomenon and the knowledge that being part of a community has its rewards as well.

I don’t think that global video and satellites will produce any global concept of community in the next 20 years, but people will have a greater awareness of their immediate communities. We will begin to notice the great artistic work going on out- side of the major cities — outside of New York, L.A., Paris, and London.”•

____________________________________

“Music and performance does not make any sense”:

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“After A Miserable Year, Obama’s Presidency Is On The Clock”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

I’m there whenever David Remnick focuses on politics or boxing or writers. Other topics also, but those three in particular. The New Yorker EIC touches on that trio of subjects in a piece about President Obama, who is trying to sprint to the finish line rather than run out the clock. Three quick clips from the early stages of the article follow.

____________________

Obama spent his flight time in the private quarters in the nose of the plane, in his office compartment, or in a conference room. At one point on the trip from Andrews Air Force Base to Seattle, I was invited up front for a conversation. Obama was sitting at his desk watching the Miami Dolphins–Carolina Panthers game. Slender as a switch, he wore a white shirt and dark slacks; a flight jacket was slung over his high-backed leather chair. As we talked, mainly about the Middle East, his eyes wandered to the game. Reports of multiple concussions and retired players with early-onset dementia had been in the news all year, and so, before I left, I asked if he didn’t feel at all ambivalent about following the sport. He didn’t.

“I would not let my son play pro football,” he conceded. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”

____________________

When Obama leaves the White House, on January 20, 2017, he will write a memoir. “Now, that’s a slam dunk,” the former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me. Andrew Wylie, a leading literary agent, said he thought that publishers would pay between seventeen and twenty million dollars for the book—the most ever for a work of nonfiction—and around twelve million for Michelle Obama’s memoirs. (The First Lady has already started work on hers.) Obama’s best friend, Marty Nesbitt, a Chicago businessman, told me that, important as the memoir might be to Obama’s legacy and to his finances, “I don’t see him locked up in a room writing all the time. His capacity to crank stuff out is amazing. When he was writing his second book, he would say, ‘I’m gonna get up at seven and write this chapter—and at nine we’ll play golf.’ I would think no, it’s going to be a lot later, but he would knock on my door at nine and say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Nesbitt thinks that Obama will work on issues such as human rights, education, and “health and wellness.” “He was a local community organizer when he was young,” he said. “At the back end of his career, I see him as an international and national community organizer.’

Yet no post-Presidential project—even one as worthy as Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs or Jimmy Carter’s efforts to eradicate the Guinea worm in Africa—can overshadow what can be accomplished in the White House with the stroke of a pen or a phone call. And, after a miserable year, Obama’s Presidency is on the clock. Hard as it has been to pass legislation since the Republicans took the House, in 2010, the coming year is a marker, the final interval before the fight for succession becomes politically all-consuming.

____________________

Obama’s advisers are convinced that if the Republicans don’t find a way to attract non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Asians, they may lose the White House for two or three more election cycles. And yet Obama still makes every effort to maintain his careful, balancing tone, as if the unifying moment were still out there somewhere in the middle distance. “There were times in our history where Democrats didn’t seem to be paying enough attention to the concerns of middle-class folks or working-class folks, black or white,” he said. “And this was one of the great gifts of Bill Clinton to the Party—to say, you know what, it’s entirely legitimate for folks to be concerned about getting mugged, and you can’t just talk about police abuse. How about folks not feeling safe outside their homes? It’s all fine and good for you to want to do something about poverty, but if the only mechanism you have is raising taxes on folks who are already feeling strapped, then maybe you need to widen your lens a little bit. And I think that the Democratic Party is better for it. But that was a process. And I am confident that the Republicans will go through that same process.”•

 

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“I Am Not Sure If I Consider Any One Book My Most Important”

January 19, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I read a lot of Thomas Mann in school and really enjoyed most of it, though I will acknowledge that Doctor Faustus sailed right over my teenaged head. Does anyone now write like Mann or, say, Nabakov? Should they? Theirs was a denser type of literature that seems mostly absent now. Those complexities are found more in visual culture today. The opening of a 1955 interview Frederic Morton of the New York Times did with Mann just two months before the writer died:

Travemuende, Germany — Thomas Mann’s eightieth birthday–June 6–might suggest an aged Olympian gazing distantly upon the world from his Lake Zurich retreat. The picture, however, is not entirely accurate. Before meeting this writer, for example, the Nobel prize winner had just delivered speeches on Schiller in Stuttgart and Weimar, negotiated possible film sales of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain in Goettingen and spoken on the North German radio. Soon after the interview he was to receive Honorary Citizenship of his native city (Luebeck), be the object of a number of official birthday fêtes in Zurich, launch a lecture tour in Holland and, last not least, complete his Felix Krull, which recently appeared (442 pages strong and briskly subtitled “First Volume of the Memoirs”) to a volley of German critical huzzahs.

Travemuende, the Baltic Sea resort in which this writer cornered the octogenarian, was supposed to provide a brief lull for the Herr Doktor. (In Germany, where every solvent person with spectacles is presumed to possess a Ph.D., Thomas Mann goes by the title of the Herr Doktor.) His hotel suite, though, could have been the opening-night dressing room of Mary Martin. Flowers, telephone calls, telegrams and she whom even Miss Martin could never boast of, namely Katja Mann. For to interview Herr Doktor means invariably also to interview Frau Doktor, his attractive and most vivacious wife, whose conversational impulses have a wonderful way of advancing, instead of interrupting, a causerie. On this visit she wore a smart (one is almost tempted to say snappy) turquoise velvet jacket with embroidered sleeves. During the talk she directed traffic between a messenger boy, a hotel official, the interviewer and a maid pouring tea.

In the midst of it all, the master. Clad in business gray, hands factually folded, he looked about fifteen years younger than his age and much more (there’s no help for the word) bourgeois than even his photographs. In fact, he resembled a Hanseatic grain merchant pondering, in the solitude of his office, wheat futures on the Hamburg bourse. His actual problem, just put to him by the visitor, was a little different.

“I am not sure if I consider any one book my most important,” he said in his precise but measuredly cadenced High German. “The longest and, to my mind, richest work is the Joseph tetralogy, but perhaps–” the Mann smile like the Mann phrase often has a decorous ambiguity, regretful and self-ironical at the same time “–perhaps I like ‘Joseph’ best by way of overcompensation. Because of its size it is the last read of my major works, you know.” He turned to light a cigar. “Then of course there is the Faustus which put the heaviest strain on my resources and in that sense is closest to me. And there is ‘Tonio Kroeger’; it is the most private and emotionally most autobiographical thing that I have ever done.”•

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“Might These ‘Good, Honest Citizens’ With Nothing To Hide Ever Imagine That They Might Feel A Challenge To Be A Whistleblower”

January 16, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was neither awed nor upset by Edward Snowden’s NSA leaking for a few reasons: 1) From the moment the Patriot Act passed, we had given our government a “by whatever means necessary” standard, 2) I think most Americans have embraced being watched and feel safer that way (though I don’t), 3) The technological tools of today (and certainly those of tomorrow) cannot be controlled by legislation, 4) Technology is a doubled-edged sword, and the government will be spied on as much as it spies. The power has been disseminated and it will be used, if not always well. To paraphrase Chance Gardner: “We like to watch.”

I have a great fear of imprisoning whistleblowers. We need those who will risk themselves to stop Watergates and Abu Ghraibs. And while Snowden may have stated the obvious and ironically ended up living in Russia, the ultimate surveillance state, he wasn’t wrong.

In a new Ask Me Anything at Reddit, Pentagon Papers leaker and staunch Snowden supporter Daniel Ellsberg answers an oft-asked question: Why should those with nothing to hide fear surveillance?

“Question:

I’m curious how you respond when people tell you that ‘they have nothing to hide.’ How do you help them see that this isn’t a valid argument for why they shouldn’t be concerned?

Daniel Ellsberg:

Do they want to live in a democracy, with checks and balances, restraints on Executive power? (They may not feel that they care, though I would say they should; but if they do, it’s relevant to the question that follows). Do they really believe that real democracy is viable, when one branch of government, the Executive, knows or can know every detail of every private communication (or credit card transaction, or movement) of: every journalist; every source to every journalist; every member of Congress and their staffs; every judge, at every level up to the Supreme Court? Do they think that every one of these people ‘has nothing to hide,’ nothing that could be used to blackmail them or manipulate them, or neutralize their dissent to Executive policies, or influence voting behavior? Is investigative journalism, or aggressive Congressional investigation of the Executive, or court restraints on Executive practices, really possible with that amount of transparency to the Executive of their private and professional lives and associations? And without any of those checks, the kind of democracy you have is that of the German Democratic Republic in East Germany, with its Stasi (which had a miniscule fraction of the surveillance capability the NSA has now, but enough to turn a fraction of the population of East Germany into secret Stasi informants).

Might these ‘good, honest citizens’ with nothing to hide ever imagine that they might feel a challenge to be a whistleblower, or a source to a journalist or Congressperson, or engage in associations or parties critical of the current administration? As The Burglary recounts, it was enough to write a letter to a newspaper critical of the FBI to get on J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI list for potential detention or more active surveillance. And once on, hard or impossible to get off. (See ‘no fly’ lists today ).”

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“They Went Around The Country And Created Computer Clubs Everyplace They Went”

January 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Medium, Walter Isaacson posted a new excerpt (which awaits your crowdsourcing) from his forthcoming book on Silicon Valley creators. His latest segment concerns the famed Homebrew Computer Club, the original cult of the microprocessor, which was spread across the country with a Johnny Appleseed approach several years before there was an Apple Computers. The first two paragraphs: 

“The Homebrew Mentality

In June 1975, the month that Gates first moved down to Albuquerque, Ed Rogers decided to send the Altair or the road showing off its marvels as if it were a carney show exhibit. His goal was to create computer clubs in towns across America, preferably filled with Altair loyalists. He tricked out a Dodge camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hotspots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville. Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was an amazingly neat marketing ploy. ‘They bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs everyplace they went,’ he marveled. ‘Most of the computer clubs in America were created by MITs.’ Gates was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined for the ride when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people — a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers — paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game, doubters came and looked under the table assuming there were cables to some bigger minicomputer hidden underneat. ‘But once they saw it was real,’ Allen recalled. ‘the engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.’

One of the stops that summer was Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto. There a fateful encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hackers and hobbyists from a newly-formed local group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. ‘The room was packed with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,’ the club’s newsletter reported. Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo that software, like information, should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes — so different from the entrepreneurial zeal of those who had migrated up from Albuquerque — which had flowed together in the early 1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club.”

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“Are There Patterns We Can Discern That Reveal A Bigger Truth About Human Psychology And Creative Thought?”

January 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve never understood people continually doing something they’re bad at. Why continue to pound your head against a wall? I guess there’s something noble in perseverance in the face of no progress, but I still find efforts exhausting.

But when it comes to those who are truly talented at their work, why do some make remarkable leaps and others flounder? Is it merely aptitude or do some climates favor rainmakers? From Alan Rocke’s Los Angeles Review of Books piece about Exceptional Creativity in Science and Technology, an exploration into creative innovation and the conditions that lead to transformative breakthroughs:

“Consider two world-changing stories that happened almost simultaneously. During the fall of 1903, on a floating platform in the Potomac River, the distinguished astronomer Samuel Langley carried out two highly touted tests of what he hoped would be the first heavier-than-air flying machine. The US Army liberally funded these experiments and the Smithsonian Institution, which Langley directed, sanctioned them. But Langley’s device crashed into the river both times, so he abandoned the project. Nine days after the second failed test, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two obscure Ohio bicycle mechanics successfully flew their own machine, in front of only a handful of local witnesses. With none of the funding, prestige, and resources that Langley had enjoyed, Wilbur and Orville Wright inaugurated aviation history.

Or consider a second story. In 1904, the world-famous mathematical physicist Henri Poincaré, professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, was taking significant steps toward a new conception of time and space, and defending an idea he called ‘the principle of relativity.’ But an obscure patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland scooped him. In a ridiculously short paper, published in 1905 just two months after receiving his PhD degree, this patent clerk, 26-year-old Albert Einstein, was able to frame these issues in a novel way, deriving several extraordinary new consequences. The principle of relativity proved to be just the starting point for Einstein’s revolutionary theory of relativity.

The history of creative innovation in science and technology is full of stories like these. How do we account for them? Are there patterns we can discern that reveal a bigger truth about human psychology and creative thought?”

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“The Next Global Conflicts Are More Likely To Be Fought In Tightly Packed Urban Areas”

January 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Hope Landsem’s WSJ review of David Kilcullen’s new book about the future of warfare, a passage about the heat of the battle potentially shifting to areas of population density:

“Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla is his attempt at a study of future threats. The author says he was alerted by ‘a sense of dissonance about our reliance on ‘pure’ or binary theories that are framed around the nature of a specific threat group.’ Mr. Kilcullen worries that previous counterinsurgency theories, his own included, don’t adequately address current or potential problems, including global trends like population growth, urbanization, and the ready dissemination of military expertise and technology such as cellphones and drones.

These trends, Mr. Kilcullen says, will have a profound effect on the future of warfare. Take Libya, where anti-Gadhafi rebels in 2011 were able to use their technical expertise to modify weapons in factories near Benghazi—despite their lack of prior military experience. In Syria, urban areas became breeding grounds for dissatisfaction following years of diminishing water supplies. Social networks and social media helped fuel Syria’s 2011 uprising, which subsequently devolved into a sectarian civil war centered around cities.

As these examples show, the next global conflicts are more likely to be fought in tightly packed urban areas rather than in mountain environs. Coastal regions present extremely likely future threats, Mr. Kilcullen says—fitting, given that coastal regions contain more than 80% of the world’s cities.”

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“A State Can End War, But A Traditional Society Cannot”

January 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Amy Chozick’s New York Times Magazine interview with Jared Diamond in which the scientist defends his recent book, The World Until Yesterday, from criticism:

“NYT:

On the other hand, the book has been criticized for saying traditional societies are very violent.

Jared Diamond:

Some people take a view of traditional society as being peaceful and gentle. But the proportional rate of violent death is much higher in traditional societies than in state-level societies, where governments assert a monopoly on force. During World War II, until Aug. 14, 1945, American soldiers who killed Japanese got medals. On Aug. 16, American soldiers who killed Japanese were guilty of murder. A state can end war, but a traditional society cannot.

NYT:

People have called the book racist, saying it suggests third-world poverty is caused by environmental factors instead of imperialism and conquests.

Jared Diamond:

It’s clearly nonsense. It’s not as if people in certain parts of the world were rich until Europeans came along and they suddenly became poor. Before that, there were big differences in technology, military power and the development of centralized government around the world. That’s a fact.”

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“Cyberwar Is Not Something That Will Take Place In A Far-Off Realm”

January 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, has a new book about cybersecurity and sat for an interview on the topic with Alyson Sheppard of Popular Mechanics. An excerpt:

“Question:

How are countries coming to terms with the ethics of using digital weapons in a military context?

P.W. Singer:

It’s a new realm of international competition and conflict and it’s very much on its way to becoming an arms race. I mean the worst aspect of arms races in the past, where countries spend a lot of money competing with each other but end up all less secure. We explore in the book the role of international negotiations and the potential of new laws and arms control. It’s going to be really difficult, but that doesn’t mean there’s not value in trying.

You also have this issue to be worked out on the national level. You have more than 100 countries building cyber military command equivalents. The civilian side needs to better understand the ramifications. This is most definitely a concern in both the U.S. and China, particularly right now when there’s a buildup of capabilities and military doctrines that are not well understood by the civilian leaders.

It’s not just our role as citizens of these countries and netizens of the Internet itself, but it’s all affecting this online world that we depend on. Cyberwar is not something that will take place in a far-off realm. It’s something that will happen on the Internet that we all use. It’s not just that we might be targeted—it’s that it will go through us.”

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“[It] Was Found To Be ‘Surprisingly Effective’ In Determining How Popular A Book Would Be”

January 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The wonderful 3 Quarks Daily pointed me to a Telegraph article by Matthew Sparkes about an algorithm which is said to have better than 80% success predicting which books will be bestsellers. In short: Use conjunctions, avoid cliches and favor nouns and adjectives over verbs. The opening:

“Scientists have developed an algorithm which can analyse a book and predict with 84 per cent accuracy whether or not it will be a commercial success.

A technique called statistical stylometry, which mathematically examines the use of words and grammar, was found to be ‘surprisingly effective’ in determining how popular a book would be.

The group of computer scientists from Stony Brook University in New York said that a range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including ‘interestingness,’ novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is, but admit that external factors such as luck can also play a role.”

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“It Hit Me Like The Assassinations Of The Sixties”

January 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In Ian Thomson’s Financial Times piece about Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s new Philip Roth book, he includes a brief passage about the Roth-Primo Levi relationship. That segment mentions a 1986 New York Times article Roth write about Levi. A passage from each follows.

From Thomson:

“Roth met Levi in the spring of 1986. If Levi was unprepared for Roth’s engagingly gentle presence, Roth found Levi surprisingly sociable. (‘With some people you just unlock,’ Roth recalled.) As they said goodbye outside the Italian Cultural Institute in London, Levi told Roth: ‘You know, this has all come too late.’ The encounter nevertheless proved to be one the most important in 20th-century literature. Roth afterwards interviewed Levi for the New York Times and helped to consolidate Levi’s reputation across the Atlantic. Accompanied by Bloom, Roth had called on Levi in September 1986 at the paint and varnish factory outside Turin where he had worked as an industrial chemist. The staff were warned not to mention Portnoy’s Complaint, as Roth was apparently no longer so fond of his ‘masturbation novel.’

Seven months later, Levi was dead. The effect on Roth of Levi’s suicide in 1987 was ‘staggering.’ Roth told Pierpont, adding: ‘It hit me like the assassinations of the sixties.’ Although Roth had cultivated friendships with other European writers, notably Ivan Klíma and Milan Kundera, his friendship with Levi, Pierpoint says, had gone ‘remarkably deep.'”

_______________________

From “A Man Saved By His Skills,” by Roth:

“ON the September Friday that I arrived in Turin – to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before – I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist and, afterwards, until retirement, as factory manager. Altogether the company employs 50 people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes – all of it is encompassed in four or five acres a seven-mile drive from Turin. The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never really distressingly loud, the yard’s acrid odor – the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement – is by no means disgusting, and the skip loaded with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t particularly unsightly. It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but a very long way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi’s autobiographical narratives. On the other hand, however far from the prose, it is clearly a place close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stench, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in The Monkey’s Wrench, saying to Levi – who calls Faussone ‘my alter ego’ – ‘I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.’

On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving on to production, I asked Levi if he could iden-tify the particular chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: I thought it smelled a little like a hospital corridor. Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air. With a smile he told me, ‘I understand and can analyze it like a dog.’

He seemed to me inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest’s most astute intelligence. Levi is small and slight, though not quite so delicately built as his unassuming demeanor makes him at first appear, and still seemingly as nimble as he must have been at 10. In his body, as in his face, you see – as you don’t in most men – the face and the body of the boy that he was. His alertness is nearly palpable, keenness trembling within him like his pilot light.”

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“He Was A Hero In Certain Circles Well Before The Assassination Of President Kennedy”

January 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think you know my feelings about JFK conspiracists, but Mark Lane, author of 1966’s Rush to Judgement, a broadside directed at the Warren Commission, has lived a colorful existence even beyond that explosive chapter in American history. A lawyer for anti-war factions and civil-rights groups in the 1960s, Lane later became a legal representative for Jim Jones and his Jonestown settlement in Guyana, which in 1978 descended into madness and mass death. He was on the scene when the cult members prepared to follow their mad leader’s orders–to drink his Kool-Aid–and survived by escaping and hiding somewhere safer–the jungle.

Here’s Lane, in 1966, discussing the Warren Commission with William F. Buckley.

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