we have a remedy! we have!

our economy's cries can be heard all around the world--even in the condé nast building, which is usually a fortress invulnerable to such woes, safeguarded by all manner of magic enchantments against the plight of the common, un-prada-clad citizen. but no more! apparently, when the financial sector screws itself, tragedy ensues for advance publications:

Condé Nast Publications named a new publisher for The New Yorker on Thursday and put the magazine’s previous publisher in charge of Internet ad sales for the entire company. The move is part of a continuing reorganization as the company grapples with the magazine industry’s plunging ad revenue. . . .

Lisa Hughes, The New Yorker’s new vice president and publisher . . . takes over a magazine clearly in need of help. The New Yorker’s ad pages dropped 26.8 percent in 2008, far more than other Condé Nast titles, and more than double the industrywide decline of 11.7 percent. Financial services ads, a New Yorker mainstay, were among the hardest-hit categories last year.

The New Yorker was operating in the black in early 2008, but not by the end of the year, according to company executives who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss finances.

welcome, lisa hughes! may you do my favorite weekly proud. and as a concerned citizen and devoted reader of your foundering publication, i would very much like to do my part to assist in the rescue effort. in that spirit, a suggestion:

FIRE SASHA FRERE-JONES. HE IS A SUCKING WOUND IN THE ABDOMEN OF THE NEW YORKER AND A KNIFE IN THE EYE OF ANY AND ALL SELF-RESPECTING MUSIC ENTHUSIASTS.

come on, lisa. come on. you know it's true. how can anyone who trash-talks pavement for their lyrical obscurity, and indie music in general for its disinterest in prominent rhythm and musical tradition, one week and then raves about animal collective for their penchant for chaos and near-total absence of linguistic sense, rhythm, or melody the next ever expect to be taken seriously? did he think we wouldn't notice? well, here's what i think: every once in a while when sasha tries to skeev on some sweet young thing at webster hall, said thing gives him a once-over, rolls its eyes, and says, "whatevs, old man." this causes a knee-jerk wholesale rejection of youth and indie culture for being ridiculous and inscrutable, followed by a renewed effort to convince said culture that he is still in the game. but it's all crap. CRAP. and we know it's crap—that's right, we're on to you, you fraud!—because he is at least a year behind the curve on profiling anyone of interest. by march of 2008 everyone in america knew who amy winehouse was and what kind of shape her liver was in. no, there was not anything surprising about her being awarded five grammys; nor was there anything surprising in sasha's profile of her, which he very gamely admitted came out about a billion years after her album exploded and her notoriety became fodder for leno and letterman. what would be surprising is if he ever, EVER reviewed ANY album or act before it was old hat, or said anything in that review that wasn't an uninspired, slightly snootier regurgitation of things that were already generally known, even by me, when i am so far from hip that i still rhapsodize about the golden era of radio (i.e., 1991–1997) and occasionally wake up craving counting crows' recovering the satellites. even i can tell, sasha, that everyone at the new yorker ought to be telling you to piss up a rope. i would draw on some of your more recent articles for evidence, but i more or less gave up reading them some time ago. i bet i'm not alone.

that's approximately two pages of every issue, lisa, that you are practically throwing away. two whole pages. with a circulation of between one and two million, i mean, that really adds up. and it's not like he's going to change. the pattern is proven. you have to cut him loose. you just have to. really, it isn't about me; it's about the new yorker. it is an eighty-four-year-old institution, and i know you don't want it failing on your watch. it survived the depression, for christ's sake.

just, do the right thing, lisa. we're all counting on you now. it's in your hands.




p.s. while you are doing right things, perhaps you should take this opportunity to reconsider nancy franklin's tenure. it could be that i don't watch enough television, but i'm pretty sure it's that she's unbearable.

vacation week at the new yorker zoology fact-checking desk

may 12, 2008, p. 59:

In his living room, Myhrvold has a life-size T. rex skeleton, surrounded by all manner of other dinosaur artifacts. One of those is a cast of a nest of oviraptor eggs, each the size of an eggplant. You'd think a bird that big would have one egg, or maybe two. That's the general rule: the larger the animal, the lower the fecundity. But it didn't. For Myhrvold, it was one of the many ways in which dinosaurs could teach us about ourselves. "You know how many eggs were in that nest?" Myhrvold asked. "Thirty-two."

and you know how many birds are in a room with thirty-two ovulating oviraptors? none, because oviraptors are reptiles, like just about all the other freaking dinosaurs, and they were relatively small dinosaurs in their time and environment, and larger animals have lower fecundity because they have longer gestation periods, but reptiles and other animals that lay eggs don't really have to worry about that (on average, an ostrich—an actual bird that is actually large—lays just over one egg a week, and each egg takes about forty days to hatch, so at any given moment during breeding season there might be five or six eggs from one bird in any nest [but ostriches share nests, so there would probably be more like twenty or thirty eggs total in any one nest, and there might be as many as sixty]), and reptiles tend to lay eggs in large clutches rather than one or two at a time, although most paleontologists are pretty sure that oviraptors, being bird-like, but not birds, formed and laid two eggs at a time and laid multiple pairs sequentially in a single nest, and yes, i am furrowing my nerdy brow at malcolm gladwell, and it pains me greatly, but, damn it, you can't start an article talking about a quantum physicist who goes on dinosaur hunts and get my heart all in an uproar and then do something like this and expect to just get away with it, especially not when i've waited five bloody months for you to do it, gladwell, you weenie. you could have left out this entire paragraph and made your point just as well, if not better, and i wouldn't want to swat you with a rolled-up magazine. sometimes you get so greedy for a higher-resonance close that i think i'll have to start calling you mcfuzz.

she was a bird, by the way. ask your myhrvold about that.


postscript, may 8, 1:59 PM: i had to distance myself from this article for an hour or so, to regain my objectivity, but i have come back and finished it, and it, you know, it's fine. it's a very good point, really, that people have a hard time distinguishing scientific innovation from artistic creation, and they should be distinguished: scientific advancement builds on preexisting knowledge, and in that sense every invention is a collaboration. but while artists typically have myriad influences, imagination can function in a near-vacuum. so while it might be art for someone who's never seen a telephone to think, "wouldn't it be neat if there were some kind of machine that allowed me to talk to someone far away," that visionary won't get anywhere without the aid of some other person, or several people, who knows how sounds and machines work, and there is decidedly less "art" in the construction. i think the degree of genius in either case is about equal, though (i know that i, regardless of my era or company, would never, over the course of an entire lifetime, either think up a telephone or manage to build one from its unassembled parts), and if someone has a brilliant idea independently, it shouldn't be considered any less brilliant if it turns out someone else had it, too. this is the problem with equating all invention with art: the originality factor, which doesn't apply equally in both realms, can get in the way of people's recognition of truly impressive accomplishments. it's also the problem with patents; if you come up with an idea and patent it just for the sake of planting a flag, of saying "i made this" even when you haven't actually made anything, and someone else later comes up with the same idea and has the support and means to take it further than you have, or has already gone further, do you really deserve more credit? surely you don't deserve sole credit, if you aren't capable of turning your idea into a practical reality without the knowledge and assistance of others. if you and some other person independently come up with the same idea before anyone has built anything, does either of you deserve more credit than the other? there's often so much emphasis on timing, but that really isn't relevant at all when it comes to gauging the merit of the notion or relative input into an invention. and yet we are taught that every new thing has one source, that it was one person sitting under a tree or on a hill or in a bathtub who all alone saw the answer that no one else could see. i wish we could be more communal. i know i always come back to the ants, but the truth is they're tops when it comes to societal paradigms. which ant decided to build a hill? who the hell cares? now all the ants have hills,* and it's awesome. people, you know, they're sort of silly animals. some of them even think that anything with feathers that lays eggs must be a bird. but they can't all be natural scientists; some of them have to be writers, and that's good, too. it would be better if they devoted more than one column out of twenty-four to their very good point, but i have a feeling that there are a lot more pages where these came from.



* i know that not all ants live in hills, but i had to wrap this thing up. it isn't like i don't know how writers fall into these traps.

what will i do with all these leftover pretzels?

i know that for a select few, the new yorker festival just goes on and on and on . . . they have their seminars and dinner parties and galas and elegantly lit corner booths, and the conversations and debates spin out endlessly into the twinkling, mirthful night. but there is nothing select about me, and my expendable income for the month of october is more or less used up, and so my party is all over. i'm so sad that i don't live in an era of public conversational salons and roundtable fêtes; even in college i could feel the loss, but i wasn't in despair. there was still one coffee shop that people sat around and discussed ideas in, there was an art gallery down the street that hosted biweekly potluck suppers open to anyone in the neighborhood, and i could always corner someone at a party and pick a fight about the estate tax or the bohr model or whether there is such a thing as a nonmisogynistic french film (i still can't decide). now everything happens in chat rooms or comment threads or text messages, you can't get anyone to engage in three dimensions, and it's dreadful. the internet will be the death of artistic movements, i'm sure of it. something happens when you put people with a common interest or goal together in a room that just can't occur when they aren't face to face. a spontaneous and immediate reaction to an idea or statement will always lead to a more rewarding discourse. there are more coffee shops all the time, and they're always full of people, but those people are all sitting at their own tables, talking on their cell phones or clacking away at their laptops, and it's a completely dead atmosphere. for me, anyway. i guess the people in the coffee shops feel o.k. about it. but my heart will always long for the communal, intellectual atmosphere of the belle époque, and i know that all of those folks were fairly select, too, but at least they were trying. if i had more than twelve square feet to host them in, i might try to start up some gatherings of my own. well, if i had more than twelve square feet and a chair, and maybe some kind of table, even if it weren't round, you know, an end table or something, or a tray table, and more than one glass. *sigh* someday.

anyway.

the closer to the word-nerd party, featuring ira glass as the ringmaster and susan orlean, chuck klosterman, and malcolm gladwell as themselves, was not officially a new yorker event, though there were, obviously, a high number of references to the magazine and its practices and contents. not to disparage the festival, but i think last night's talk was better than any of the other literary events i attended this past weekend, because it was so lightly mediated and loosely themed, and because ira mostly wanted the writers to talk to each other. the event was both promotion for ira's new book, the new kings of nonfiction (which actually contains a lot of not-new nonfiction that apparently had been piling up on glass's desk long enough for him to feel compelled to do something with it), and a benefit for 826nyc, the local branch of 826, a national nonprofit organization that offers free after-school programs and tutoring in creative writing for school kids from kindergarten on up. i love that 826 exists. i love that dave eggers, john scieszka, and sarah vowell are heavy presences on its board and keep it a little wacky. i love that a young, broadly lauded writer with a good amount of clout chose to start up a wacky nonprofit to help kids instead of buy a $7 million brownstone so each of his own kids could have a private floor (man, foer, you really turned out to be one glaring disappointment after another). and i love susan orlean and fidgety lefties who bite their nails and scrape the labels off of their water bottles and pick at the untucked tails of their shirts (aww, my secret boyfriend fiddles with inanimate objects, too! we're so perfect for each other). until tonight i just kind of felt all right about ira, but now i love him too, and i don't think i'd ever heard of or read anything by chuck klosterman until a few days ago (sorry, dude, but i stopped flipping through spin when i was about 16), but what the hell—i love you too, man! i love your sweeping hand gestures that have probably proven dangerous to passersby, i love that you babble and flail like a vertiginous speed freak, i love that you love what you do. structured, mediated, q&a-type discussions are great for what they're worth, and sometimes they're the only way you can get things done. but ira just threw a handful of smart, eccentric spazzos together and let them gab about why they love writing about smart, eccentric spazzos, and it was brilliant. and i learned some things, too:

• susan orlean and chuck klosterman both think the word "sequelae" is pronounced "suhkweelia." i don't have a problem with this the way i do with "nucular." i had a conversation with my uncle once about which is worse, someone mispronouncing a word but placing it in an appropriate context, or someone speaking a word beautifully but using it inaccurately. we decided that misusage is a greater sin, because someone who knows what a word means but not how it sounds is someone who reads and retains knowledge and wants to enhance his or her working vocabulary, but someone who has heard a word and repeated it without taking the time to find out exactly what it means is basically a blowhard. and "suhkweelia" isn't an unpleasant-sounding word. "nucular," however, is an abomination, especially now that the incorrectness of the pronunciation has been a topic of public discussion for a while. i'll never fold on that.
  
• malcolm's working on a book about, um, something . . . cultural identity? something unbusinessy, i think, anyway, and it doesn't sound as if anyone will be able to use it to sell more chairs or records or crappy movies,* so that's nice. of course, i could be mistaken; all he really told us was that there's one chapter that he interviewed his mother and aunt for, and i have chosen to grab up that nebulous ball and run all the way to juneau with it. i'm open to most any subject matter, really, as long as little, brown prints it in the same font as the first two. the typeface and leading are so refined, and yet also so approachable and calming. very thoughtfully laid out, those books. so there's no birthday article for me this year, but i can totally live with that.
  
• it's entirely true that most people think of men first when they're asked to name people they admire for intellectual or artistic reasons. my cousin asked me the other day for some music recommendations, and i had listed about twenty artists when he stopped me and said, "it's weird that you don't listen to any girls." but i do listen to girls, and am wild about plenty of them. i just didn't remember them until i was prompted to do so. and then i was very disappointed in myself, because no one should ever forget mirah or ani difranco or mary timony or chan marshall. but i had. it's true for writers and visual artists, too, i think of faulkner and ibsen, chuck close and françois truffaut, but when i sit down and concentrate, all kinds of amazing chicks pop into the foreground. it's really strange, that women don't leap out, or really even lodge. i have to dredge them up, even the ones who've kind of changed my life. but i thought maybe it was me, and now i think it's everyone. isn't that troubling. i mean, i'm not a feminist, exactly, and i don't always get along so well with girls, but there are plenty i'd rather remember than forget. and now i'm worried that i won't.
  

susan touched on the difficulty of being a woman and a reporter, as opposed to a novelist or columnist or food writer, something that didn't require travel and weeks of immersion in a subject's life, and i thought, why should it be harder for a woman to travel than it is for a man? but it isn't necessarily; it's just harder for a woman with a home and family, and it's harder for that woman than it might be for a man with a home and family. it's easy to write it off as the result of women's desire to stay closer to home when they have a family, and to then write off such a desire as something inherently female, but what you're implying when you say a thing like that is that men don't love or miss their children as much as women do, and i doubt that. but in the end it's a personal choice, and all of my tiny x chromosomes aren't enough to enable me to muster up much sympathy for women who choose to have a child and then miss their lives. it's their choice, isn't it? you can decide that the other parent should give up a life instead, or you can decide that you will both carry on as usual and hire a third party to raise your child, but someone will have to sacrifice something on one or the other front. it's impossible for me to believe that women who are working at jobs they enjoy and then decide to have a child don't have a rough idea, one way or another, of what's going to happen once the child arrives. you want one thing most, right? and you pick it. it isn't gender-based, it's person-based. susan's still a writer, and an excellent writer, she just writes less. and maybe that's difficult for her, but she has the career she wanted and is positioned pretty highly within her admittedly male-dominated field. (no one was rude enough to ask ira why only two female writers were included in the current anthology, but i'm sure he was feeling the heat for a minute or two.) am i an awful woman? am i a heartless woman? maybe i'm an ignorant woman. it seems that people of both genders whine a lot about how they can't have it all, but nobody has it all. my sympathies are with the people who don't have enough, or who aren't free to make a lot of choices about their own lives, and i think that susan is not that kind of person. i mean, i'm not that kind of person, even without a chair or a table, so what is she complaining about? i like you, lady, but suck it up.

in the same vein, as much as i hate having to jab malcolm in the kidney with my pointy stick, he occasionally drives me to it, and it really irks me when he mocks the wealthy. i mean, the man ain't broke. he's not digging through the couch cushions for enough change to buy a box of spaghetti at trade fair. he isn't on the wrong side of any tracks. rally for the underclass, sure, but don't sling mud at the rich. again, i think that most people have more than they need, but maybe someone with way, way more than he needs will actually be more willing to hand some of it off in a charitable manner, because that handoff is so unlikely to impact his quality of life. someone in the middle class might decide that he shouldn't have to help anyone else, because he still has a lot less than the people with the most. but if what ultimately matters about wealth is how it's allocated, i'm going to side with the obscenely wealthy people who are donating a fifth of their income to social programs and charities before i'm going to side with the people making $30,000 or $40,000 a year who glare at homeless people and toss the jimmy fund can over their shoulder when it's passed around the movie theater. the residents of southampton may or may not ever have done much of anything at all in terms of supporting worthy causes. i have no idea, and i don't think malcolm does, either. what i'm sure of is that i'd rather align myself with the people who are doing something, even if it's only for the tax deduction, than side by default with the people in my tax bracket, because they certainly aren't always the same people. some people make their assets a central part of their character, but i don't think there's any call to do it for them. the rennert saga was moronic, and more than worthy of extensive pointing and laughing, but i want to laugh, you know, at the case, and not the individuals. maybe there isn't a way to do that. i'm kind of struggling, lately, with efforts to prevent my hatred of certain aspects of people from emerging as hatred of those people, period, and i don't know yet how effectively it can be accomplished. i'm looking for the gray areas. and i know that malcolm is also primarily mocking the acts and not the individuals, but sometimes it's just so hard to visualize a firm line. don't worry, though, i'm not going to stop hating people. god, can you imagine? what a boring, wasted life that would be.

chuck, um, didn't say anything that i feel strongly about or moved to comment on. he seemed smart and funny, and fun, and a bit manic. mostly he seemed just plain happy, with his life and what he's able to do with it, and that's such a lovely thing. but, it's just, i mean, he didn't want to write about the strokes, but he did, and i don't want to read about the strokes, and i won't. and i can only keep up with one magazine at a time, and he writes for about nineteen, so i don't know how often we'll cross paths. alas and alack, but there are only so many hours in the day.

i guess i'm assuming everyone knows about ira glass, but for anyone who doesn't, here. love him or hate him, but don't hate him in my house.

so, yeah, the end of this party. but all is not lost: reviews are forthcoming on other festival events, i swear. you'd never know it to scroll through iaaph these days, but i do care about things that are not malcolm gladwell. not many, but enough to shut the hell up about him every so often, and i'm going to. honest. tomorrow. i think i'd like to talk about mark danielewski for a while, too, if anyone wants to stop by, and the new mcsweeney's collection of very, very short stories is filling my heart with love and blood and other assorted substances of varying densities. i know there isn't much room in this place; go ahead and climb on the bed if you want, and i'll perch up here on the counter, and if everyone brings a glass i'll make sure there's enough to drink. it won't be the start of a revolution, but i think we'll all get on just fine.





* update, 10/10/08, 1:21 PM: i was, um, really, really wrong about this. the eternal optimist meets with eternal slaps in the face, i guess. this book is more about the creative process than the process of marketing creations, though, i think, and its projected release date is awfully close to my birthday in 2008; he's trying.

i know you're on the edge of your seat . . .

fact: adam gopnik is even more self-conscious and eager to both please everyone and not let on that he cares about pleasing anyone in person than he is in print. i hadn't known it could happen, but there it is.

fact: malcolm gladwell does an adorably awkward and fidgety-teenagerish thing with his right foot when he's forced to stand still while speaking. he's also left-handed. i am incredibly happy about both of these things.

fact*: despite the official call, based on a highly unscientific (and uncounted) show of hands and made by the heavily and unabashedly biased mediator, simon schama, who is a professor at columbia, gladwell made a far better argument, in that he more fully and roundly supported his point: ivy league schools make judgments and awards based on criteria other than academic merit, and this is unacceptable for academic institutions of any standing, but particularly for those of such legendary standing as harvard, yale, and princeton. the problem, i think, was that his well-made point didn't fully support his position, which was that the campuses of harvard, yale, and princeton should be levelled and the land sold for condominium development. i'm not without bias myself, as we all know, but i don't agree with that at all. if the aim is to promote social equality within the confines of the grounds, maybe it would be better to turn the space into a kind of public orchard, to be maintained by the pinko zealots effecting the takeover, using the amassed funds in the schools' current accounts. anyone could come in and pick fruit from the trees and then lounge around on the grass thinking brilliant thoughts for free. all of these schools have large bodies of water nearby for their crew teams, so irrigation wouldn't be too much trouble. we could keep some of the older buildings intact and turn them into hostels and mulch sheds. i guess we could grow other things, maybe tubers and legumes, but i do think the plants should be more utilitarian than decorative. but it would have to be something like that, an open-access venture. if you want to do away with the schools because they bar entry to intelligent and motivated but poorly connected individuals from the lower classes, it makes no sense to turn them into high-end housing that those individuals also couldn't get into. of course malcolm was joking about all of that, but still, hon, make a joke that's in keeping with the theme.

gopnik's primary counterargument was the same one i would have made: if you do away with those three schools, three more will move up to take their place as the most recognizable brands in american higher education. people love status, they love being affiliated with things that convey status, they love bearing brand labels that tell onlookers that their lives are better than the average life. applicants to schools like harvard and yale and princeton know that they're buying into a brand. there aren't any illusions about it; most people understand that they can get the same, if not a better, education at another, less well-known institution. but the names of those institutions don't open as many doors. people think something about you when they see that you're wearing a designer label, and they think something about you when they hear that you graduated from yale. but they think it at the level of the brand, not the faculty or curriculum, and you know when you don the label that you are only attempting to project at the level of the brand. schools like harvard, yale, and princeton—and internationally coveted fashion lines like versace and prada—will exist as long as human beings are human beings. we don't always have the time to tell someone we've just met about all the ways in which we are better than him or her; sometimes we need something small that we can flash quickly, like a handbag or an alma mater, in order to get the job done and be on our way.

and gladwell's rebuttal was the same as mine would have been: the desire for such instant and ultimately meaningless recognition is asinine, and we shouldn't allow or encourage or enable universities to accommodate it. we should enact changes that make the name on the tag irrelevant to the assessment of the product, and those changes have to happen at every level. published school rankings should reflect more meaningful measures, such as what becomes of students once they're enrolled and how many of them go on to do things that strengthen society, and people reviewing or applying to colleges should demand more information on how the school serves its active students, instead of how the name of the school serves its graduates. naturally, right? and yet so not the way things tend to be done.

just to be up front, i'll tell you that i applied and was accepted to an ivy league school (not one of the three mentioned above) but decided not to attend it because i was offended by its graduation requirements. specifically, i would have had to pass a swim test in order to receive my degree. this was a common requirement at a number of schools until around 1980, when most places began to realize how goofy and unnecessary it was. the current holdouts include cornell, columbia, notre dame, dartmouth, and swarthmore. i can swim just fine, but it bothered me, and continues to bother me, that whether or not i graduated could hinge on something that was 100 percent nonacademic. i think the requirement's aquatic nature got under my skin, too. there's something about water and the gilded upper crust in my mind—the newport oceanfront mansions, sculling, gatsby's pool, i don't know. i kept thinking of those 1980s movies where the rich preppy in his tennis whites finishes waxing his yacht in preparation for the regatta and then goes over and kicks sand on the poor townie schlub who really, really, really needs the prize money but will never win (or so everyone assumes) because he can't already afford a killer boat. but a school that doesn't accept students purely on the strength of their academic merits can't be expected to graduate them that way. i went to a private non-ivy college, spent two miserable years there, and then transferred to the state college down the street. the main building of that college had once been a public high school and still had lockers on its ground floor. there were never more than thirty students in a class, the professors were supportive and always accessible, i was able to pay my entire tuition in cash, and i learned approximately eighty-three times more in a semester than i had at my first school. when it comes to basic undergraduate education, failure should be an impossibility for a student who wants and is trying to succeed. if the school provides access to the proper resources, it is impossible. at my state school, there was a very high degree of support for students in terms of assistance outside of the classroom, arrangements made for students who had to hold jobs, flexible scheduling, etc. at the private institution, where i was paying fifteen times the tuition, those things were not really available. of the twenty or so people i became friendly with during my freshman orientation, all incredibly bright and driven kids who'd been near the tops of their high school classes, only about half graduated on time, and some never graduated at all. do i think this means all state schools are boffo? absolutely not. nor do i think all private or top-tier institutions are full of crap. what i think is that you can find outstanding colleges, and lousy ones, at every level of the current ranking system, and i can't help but think that that must mean the current ranking system is pretty full of crap. so i agreed with malcolm before he said anything. what, are you shocked? like that never happens.

i agreed with gopnik, though, too, to a tiny degree, in that it makes less sense to get rid of elite institutions than it does to attempt to reform their operations or enlighten the public so that they can, i guess, demand reformed operations. but he didn't offer any suggestions as to how we might do that. he didn't offer any suggestions at all, really. what he did was call malcolm the pol pot of parchment (at least three times); compare the grouping of harvard, yale, and princeton to the factitious but catchy "axis of evil" triad; insist that the ivy league provides tremendous opportunity without referencing anything even resembling a fact in support of that statement (and even then he was talking about opportunity for its students, or maybe just its graduates, when the problem is that it is denying opportunities to deserving applicants based on snooty, capricious whims); and closed with the warning that a vote for malcolm gladwell's america is a vote for george bush's america, but a vote for gopnik's america is a ballot cast in obama-esque optimism. a gimmicky and failed (and sort of rovian) presentation, i thought, which was too bad, because if he'd tried he could maybe have gone somewhere with the original idea. or maybe that was the best he could do, i don't know. on the quasi-upside, i have decided that his smugness is affected rather than intrinsic. i'm having some trouble figuring out why anyone would choose to project smugness. it could be a defensive posture (new york in the 1980s was a rather fierce place), or perhaps it's the result of parisian influence. i really can't say, never having lived in either place, and especially never having been a short canadian man in either place. i do not like him more, exactly, but i am infuriated by him less. and that's the best i can do. there was no ass-rolling, anyway. sorry to disappoint, kids, i know some of you were keeping your fingers crossed for an old-school rumble, but he was so sweaty and ill at ease up there under those bright lights (which only he had to speak under, weirdly; when malcolm was talking the hall was dimmed. does anyone know what that was about? it was so odd) with his shirt collar open, trying to look so smooth, grasping at liberal straws, that even i would have felt too mean to end it all by letting his sizable audience watch him get beat up by a girl. he and i both know the truth, and that's enough for me.

it was all pretty light, as it should have been, because in the end there's just nothing to it. if we all agree that there are excellent schools that are more willing to accept funny-looking students with no legacies or trust funds than the ivy league schools are, then we could probably agree that those students should attend those schools instead of harvard, yale, or princeton, since they'll probably have a better time somewhere else, anyway. it's an undeniable irritation that someone who went to harvard can simply say "i went to harvard" and be greeted with more and better job or postgraduate offers, despite his high-C average, than a student who maintained an A average at the university of virginia. but the things that need to happen in order to change that can either be brought about now, with schools operating as they already do, or not at all. we have to change our priorities. razing a few lecture halls won't help with that. refusing to pay top dollar and beyond for a designer logo might help that. but that isn't really the american way.




* fact: i really do say "fact" in this way when i'm speaking out loud. it's one of my less endearing conversational traits, right after my unfortunate air-quotes affliction, but you're here for the real me, right? and that's what you're getting.

losing my appetite

september 14 was a big red letter day for one miss juniper pearl, ladies and gentleman. on that day, she woke up rather late, made herself some coffee, and sat down in her living room to read a chapter or two of some book or other before she got to work proofreading the copyedited chapters of some manuscript or other that was on its way to being a book. and that was that.

perhaps you are wondering which of the above letters struck her as so big and red, as they all look rather small and standard here on the page. but it's a trick, you see; the big red letters are not up there. there is a small sign pointing in their direction, and my most loyal and observant readers may have noted it, but then again they may not have, so let me help: miss pearl took her coffee and sat down to read a book.

do you see? DO YOU SEE????? a book! she read a book! it's been months and months, so many endless and interminable months, since she even considered reading a book! but she was able to do it that day, my friends, because

she did not have an unread issue of the new yorker in her possession.


woohooooo!!!!! woooooo!!!!!!!! hooray!!!!!!!! and let me tell you, folks, it was a good thing. see, the issue she had finished the day before was the september 3 food issue, and some of the articles in the food issue were about as tasteful and tantalizing as nineteen-day-old beef lo mein, slick with heavy lubricants and and packed with colorful but bland and oversteamed vegetables, all of it laminating the tongue and throat with its swampy bilge, leaving the eater quite certain that he or she is going to deeply regret having eaten it in an hour or two . . .

well, it was a much needed break. and no one is sadder about that than miss pearl, because she hasn't needed or wanted a break from the new yorker since 1995. she is so sad about it, in fact, that she is having some trouble accepting it and has been driven to speak about the incident in the third person. but she's coming to terms with it, and i think that maybe taking a moment to discuss some of her grievances will help everyone move on. so.

nauseator #1: calvin trillin on the street food of singapore. there would have been nothing wrong with this article if calvin had happened to be in singapore and decided, while he was there, to sample some of the local vendors' fare. in fact, that would have been a delightful article. i like asian food, i like street vendors, i like things on sticks, and i am passionate about noodles. i'm also fond of calvin overall. what i do not like so much is the idea of anyone, anyone, in this age of rampant pollution, impending fuel shortages, and the vast and relentless publicity surrounding both of those concerns (some of it spewing forth from the new yorker itself, hype whore that it is these days), hopping on a jet and flying to the other side of the planet for the sole purpose of sampling the local vendors' fare. the thought of it makes me crazy in all kinds of ways. of course the blind self-absorption of the act hurts my heart, but i think trillin's choice to write a gleeful six-page article about the act as though it were worthy of global notice and commendation hurts it more, and the new yorker's decision to run that article positively breaks it, since it means they have decided that they are catering to a readership that wants that kind of article. now, by "that kind of article" i don't mean food writing; lots of people love that, and i am often one of them. but while reading this article, one gets the feeling that trillin thinks he is a crazy, crazy rebel, eating food on the street while standing up like some kind of rough-knuckled, down-to-earth anydude, even though we all know that a round-trip business-class flight from new york to singapore costs somewhere around $7,000 and the quantity and variety of food he crammed into his oblivious, bottomless gullet while in singapore could easily have rung in at something similar. he may have said some intriguing things about singaporean cuisine, but the premise of the article was so ludicrous that i could just barely hear them. does anyone really go on vacation to eat? in all of singapore, there was nothing that trillin wanted to see more than the country's food courts? and he's planning his return trip before he's even landed back in the u.s., that's how natural all of it seems to him. well, it seems grotesque to me, and i am tempted to start up a "keep trillin fat in nyc" fund and buy the man some cooking lessons, so he can learn how to make char kway teow in his own home. i might love to read about his successes and follies in the kitchen. it isn't his style that's jogging all those greasy burps loose from the murky depths of my roiling bowels.

swerve from this to judith thurman, who chose to spend her vacation eating nothing at all. this is an endeavor that could, potentially, have some merit; alas, "could" is as close as we come. all promise is negated by her choice to (a) fast in an elite spa; (b) fast for only three days; and (c) attempt to draw correlates between this experience and the highly significant, often world-changing hunger strikes of various historical and religious figures, including gandhi. she speaks with great authority about the giddiness and energy some long-term fasters, including anorexics, can experience after many days without food—something i question her right to do, since "many" in this case means many more than she spent sipping juice in the swank california courtyard of We Care. i don't know who she thinks she is to lecture anyone about ramadan or christ's forty days in the desert, but after reading her piece i do have a new understanding of and empathy for job, who "got too depressed to eat." if anyone is interested in a writerly account of a non-"ultra-lush" fast, i recommend david rakoff's in don't get too comfortable, which describes a twenty-day diet of strange and intricate teas that the writer brews up in his own apartment. no facials, no core radiance breathwork practitioners, no yearning to achieve more highs by struggling through three more days of nectar-fueled pampering and therapeutic colonics in an isolated, high-end resort; just one hungry writer explaining that sometimes the things we think will build character by teaching us to endure suffering do build character, but in a completely different way—by showing us how dumb it was to think that what we were enduring was the kind of suffering that builds character. i think there is a very good chance that darling judith has not read this book.

but the star of the show, the mystery container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator that has been leaking something sinister and cloudy and freckled with small mobile clots for the past three weeks, is adam gopnik, for his hopelessly and infuriatingly backwards foray into local eating. i have loved adam, i have, for many many moons, i have loved him with an everlasting love—but no more and never again. he has proven himself an insincere jumper of other people's trains, the very worst kind of ersatz environmentalist: the narrow-thinking, narrow-acting self-congratulator. and now he is my enemy. what a crying shame.

the idea of eating locally is a fine one, and the idea of defining acceptably local food as that grown within the confines of the five boroughs of new york city is about as extremist as local eating can get—even if you are only doing it for a week, as gopnik was. but the generally accepted point of local eating, as gopnik explains, is to "encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things . . . that don't have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table." gopnik claims to have been motivated at least in part by a desire to further the movement, to prove that city folk can hug trees, too. but how does he go about obtaining this local food, in a city with one of the most extensive and accessible public transportation systems in the world? why, he gets in his car, of course.

from somewhere on the upper east side, gopnik travels to the decker farm in staten island, reachable by subway and bus but only "fifteen minutes across the verrazano-narrows bridge." he heads to the red hook community farm in brooklyn, nine miles away and easy to get to by subway if you aren't afraid to walk a few blocks, which i can't imagine any long-time new yorker being. but he and his kids and his greenmarket-guru guide tool on over and back in their own car. he drives to the bronx—a distance of five miles, a little less than the distance i commute to work every morning—to try to bully some kindhearted man into slaughtering one of the beloved egg chickens he has been raising in a carefully and determinedly maintained city coop. and at the end of all this he has the balls to refer to his toe-dip in the pool of conscientious living as "M.T.A. localism," even though he mentions having made use of the m.t.a. over the course of his week-long experiment exactly once. you do not get to make up for the food miles you have spared by buying locally, adam gopnik, that is not how the plan works, and if this flirtation with the hip new shade of green were more than a fleeting whim for you, you would have realized that. at the very least, you might have felt compelled to leave the references to your car out of the article. but you didn't mean it, did you? it was just something to write a story about. one week, to prove that it could be done, even by someone like you, and then everything could go back to normal. because "normal" has, obviously, been really great for everything so far.

he got his chicken, you know; not from that decent man who read him the riot act outside of the bronx's garden of happiness but from a different place (also in the bronx, between ten and fifteen blocks from the garden, and which he also drove to) that seems to have suited him better, where someone was happy to butcher and bag a chicken that had been "born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money." of course, it isn't the money that's fatal, is it? it's the mindset; it's the choice of the person with the money to use it to do whatever makes him or her happy, the rest of the world and all that's living in it be damned. some of these people have children who seem like spoiled brats, by the way, and i'm fairly certain that isn't a coincidence. when your parents can't understand that local eating is a tiny corner of the vast landscape of environmental action, not a trendy new ribbon to pin to their suit jacket, of course you're going to wind up guzzling snapple on your central park safari. did he not bring his kids along in an attempt to teach them something? did he simply think his story required a cynical foil for his own pureness of heart? the trek through the urban pasture with wildman steve brill is something that was also done by david rakoff and recounted in don't get too comfortable. i think it is wholly possible that gopnik has read the book, but i'm not sure he read it right. in any case, it is disappointing that rakoff doesn't have some kind of byline in this issue. its writers appear to owe him tremendously for reminding them of their station.

ohhhh, sick, sick, sick. is this what the new yorker is going to be from now on, snooty blather interspersed with masturbatory jaunts into common living and faux deprivation? i read the september 17 issue; i have no recollection of it. i'm halfway through the september 24 style issue, but the only strong thought i've had associated with it is, "didn't they just put out a style issue?" i'm pretty sure it hasn't been a full year since the last one, and what's that all about? the new yorker isn't supposed to be about style, it isn't supposed to be stylish; it's supposed to be smart. i thought i could count on the better part of its staff to refrain from being pompous blowhards between the pages, at least. maybe someone is giving them too much leash. maybe someone is setting a poor example. (*ahemREMNICKahem*)

and yet, like a battered, co-dependent lover, i can't say good-bye. i believe that everything could still be turned around, if we both want it enough. be it optimism or delusion, it's led me to purchase a ticket to gladwell v. gopnik at this year's new yorker festival. i trust my malcolm to make a case i can get behind, or at least appreciate. he'll never offend me so much as this last batch of vainglorious twaddle did, and he'd have to work awfully hard to top his highest offense to date: the "talk of the town" piece on student discipline, in which he tried to convince me that the world would have been far worse off if robert oppenheimer had been expelled after trying to kill a teacher with a poison apple, because if he had been we'd never have been able to melt the faces off of all those women and children in japan. ohhhhh, i was very angry that day, and the day after that. but i forgave him, because his heart was almost entirely in the right place, and because he was thinking about sports. he gets a little irrational about sports. sadly, even when he isn't thinking about sports at all, sometimes he doesn't think his arguments through from every angle. it's sweet, in its way, that he thinks everyone must see the same shades of good and bad as he does, because they tend to be sweet shades. but it's also naïve and a substantial soft spot in his armor, and i hope that it doesn't create problems in the upcoming debate, because if he doesn't mop the floor with gopnik, i will, and i will not do it in a polite, parliamentary manner. i will rush the stage and roll his fool ass. and i'll take the subway both ways to do it.

new york minute

weather: 58°F, which is quite cool, i think, for early august. it is wet, all kinds of wet, wet air, wet sidewalks, wet floor beneath the kitchen window--but also wet soil in my pepper plant's pot, and its two tiny wet fruits are the prettiest things i've seen all year.

odor: and lo, the rains did pour forth and wash away the sins of the world, and cleanse it of its old-bologna funk, and short out its third rails, and the wretched masses huddled on street corners and crowded together underground and were too angry to notice how great a rain-washed street smells early in the morning, but after they had huddled and crowded for a bit everything smelled like coffee breath and armpits anyway, so it was just as well.



maybe some people become deadened to the sidewalk's layer of refuse over time, and perhaps i will too, but so far living in new york has blessed me with a drastically heightened appreciation of a clean street. david lynch would also like to encourage you to refrain from littering:



and i would like to encourage you to refrain from tampering with the united states mail. the other day my roommate came upstairs and handed me a packet of sra paperwork, the august 13 issue of the new yorker, and a white envelope that had once contained an offer for a 0% apr on balance transfers but which now contained a small ziploc baggie filled with bullets. i don't know much about munitions and so can't describe the bullets in great detail, but they were about as large as my thumb between the tip and the uppermost knuckle and looked to be made of brass. there were fifteen of them. granted, i do not need another credit card, and if i did know something about bullets i might be able to take better advantage of the ones that have been given to me--for all i know they have a high street value--but still; after a long day at work, it just isn't the kind of thing i want to ponder.

i am almost caught up on the new yorker--only three weeks behind! that's the nearest i've come to closing the gap in about a year--and it is just beginning to dawn on me that, if i wanted to, i could probably attend almost every new yorker festival event this year. i doubt that i will want to, but it sure is something to have the option. if anyone would like to join me, you're more than welcome, but be warned that i may embarrass you by hugging deborah treisman for an uncomfortably long time against her will to thank her for packing the fiction issue to the gills with miranda july, or poking louis cona with a stick until he admits that, yes, condé nast probably can afford the extra ten cents a pound it would cost to print on one-hundred-percent post-consumer recycled paper, or paintballing nick paumgarten for, oh, so many things. you are equally welcome to watch me embarass myself from a safe distance, as long as you keep your hands off malcolm. if not, there'll be an extra paintball just for you. but no brass bullets--that's just creepy.

hmm.

i think it's a little strange that there is no write-up anywhere on the internet—at least, not that i can find—about this weekend's new yorker conference. i think it's even stranger that the involved staff couldn't get it together enough to change the opening on the conference promo page that says the event is still in formation and changes will be added as they are made. apparently the near future will be awash in secrecy and misinformation, as we all struggle to hide our ingenious innovations from the grasping paws of the public and the cold, ever-present eye of big brother. or we will all be as lazy as i am, and no one will ever write anything ever again. it's bleak either way, i suppose. thanks a lot, new yorker. you've practically tripled my optimism. i can't wait to rush forward into that brave new world.


update, may 8, 5:18 PM: i found this. it's, you know, kind of like what i said, only more mature.

. . . if by "near future" you mean the present and/or the immediate past

so, it looks like for all the hype and hullabaloo surrounding the new yorker conference--or, at least, all the hype and hullabaloo the new yorker has attempted to create surrounding its conference--there isn't going to be much to it that people who read the new yorker won't already know a fair bit about. i mean, there's plenty of cool shit goin' down--dan barber will be there to talk about his sustainable and community-based agricultural projects; jonathan haidt, a social psychologist who co-authored a delightful paper on the neurological underpinnings of morality with one of the current loves of my life, joshua greene, will be on hand to remind (or at least ask) everyone to be nice; and david byrne is david byrne is david byrne, and i shouldn't have to say any more about that--but then there's will goldfarb, who makes things that are reminiscent of desserts out of ingredients that are mostly food and who was written up by buford last june (the conference page credits him with the invention of "experiental" cuisine, which sounds like what you get when you stir fry blindfolded while listening to early sonic youth albums, but i'm fairly certain that the term goldfarb actually uses is "experiential," which just sounds like a snooty, puffed-up way of saying you can taste it), and will wright, the creator of the sims, who was profiled in the magazine last november prior to the release of his new game, spore. and there's some guy who makes cocktails out of oxygenated water (?!?) whose name i refuse to know, and a bunch of men who know how to make money, and some other men who know how to make money by selling drugs. it'll be good enough, is what i'm saying, but for $1,200 it could probably be better. even my malcolm, whom remnick is pimping over this shindig as if he were a berry-lipped virgin lass and the conference were being held in a corner room at The Enchanted Hunters,* is recycling last year's news and lugging mike mccready,** the dude whose hit-song formula was tucked oh so tidily into the center of last october's epagogix article, back into the spotlight.

that article, as we all (secretly) know, was my birthday present, and a lovely present it was, and here we are at my approximate half-birthday talking about it again, and i don't love it any less . . . but the "hooray for money and formulas!" zealotry of some of its subjects didn't exactly warm my heart, and since this conference is about the future (or so we're told) and, presumably, how grand this select group of individuals is on the verge of making it--i don't know. i guess i was hoping for something a little more optimistic from malcolm than "i know a guy who can tell you how to pad a radio playlist." because if platinum blue is the future of music, boys and girls, well, i don't even know what i'll do. i hated that gnarls barkley song, but it was all around me everywhere i went for months and months, it sat on the crown of my head and thumped its knuckles against my temples in that relentless 2/4 tempo until tears came to my eyes, and i really was crazy . . . and in the land of platinum blue that would be my life. or, no, i guess more accurately my life would swerve helplessly between that and the soul-deadening cruise-liner-lounge "jazz" of norah jones. what is up, america? all the music out there, and you're all, i want to swap my right ventricle for a drum machine! no, i want to be yelled at by angsty boys wearing suits and eyeliner! no, i want to drown slowly in grade b maple syrup!

well, that's your right, isn't it. you can do all of those things. but i want to listen to mirah and the version of love spit love's "am i wrong" where the marching band comes in in the last bridge, and joanna newsom, and anything that involves a banjo or a harpsichord, and if you and people like mike mccready push the sounds i love any farther toward the left end of the dial we're apt to fall off the edge of the earth. so huzzah for math and entrepreneurs--the world benefits greatly from them both, to be sure--but keep them away from my stereo, thank you very much. we're doing just fine on our own.

i don't know why malcolm gets so excited about these things. i tend to chalk it up to a boyish love of gadgetry, the end result of coming of age alongside atari and microsoft, coupled with a very endearing desire to know why any of us likes any of the things we like, and i forgive it. how could i not? after all, i wonder about that plenty myself; i also wuved my colecovision. but all software is not good software, and lately i'm of the opinion that very little progress is good progress. i thought this conference was designed to convince me of the opposite. no dice, new yorker; it's the same old song and dance on a new stage. you don't care about progress, not really. all your pomp and chest-beating about the recycled paper you print your blow-ins on . . . you're not fooling us. the magazine itself is bright, clean, pre-consumer, tree-felling content through and through, and in truth the recycled blow-ins basically negate themselves by coming six to an issue.*** poor elizabeth kolbert, traipsing all over the planet, trying to gather enough convincing evidence to compel the right people to make the right changes in the hopes of constructing an honestly inspiring future--and the future, ungrateful little churl that it is, doesn't even invite her to its party.

well, i'm not going either, lizzie. but maybe you could ask a friend of yours who is going to ask daniel levitin why i and everyone i know can't seem to listen to this song any fewer than nineteen times in a row in any single sitting, and yet have never once heard it on the radio. curious, no? or not. i can't tell anymore. but now that i've got it in my head i must progress into my own private near future, which consists, obviously, of another eighteen listens. and that's enough music math for this evening.



* not that this is all bad; the video promo they've put together shows off malcolm's pretty eyelashes quite nicely. look at them batting all dark and sweet, bat-bat; between them and that perfect adam's apple i'm wobbly enough in the knees that i'd hand over that $1,200, if i had it to hand. oooooooh, what an evil genius david remnick is.

** lest you, as i was initially, be confused, this is not the mike mccready who has been the lead guitarist of pearl jam for the last sixteen or seventeen years--and thank god for that; i'd have been sorely disillusioned by such treachery.

*** really, is that necessary? seriously? i don't believe you.

pictures in invisible ink

it's secret pal day here in the states—at least, i think it is. it might have been yesterday, and it might be this coming sunday; the little-known holidays are a bit like floating islands. but they're no less worth celebrating for that, and of course there's no one i'd rather secretly celebrate with than my #1 secret boyfriend. awwww, aren't we cute? now forget you ever saw us. i can neither confirm nor deny having anything to do with that image.

what i can confirm is that this week's new yorker contains malcolm's latest article, which he made a point of speaking right up about the second the issue hit the stands. obviously, after our unfortunate misunderstanding regarding his last piece, he wasn't taking any chances about provoking my bitter, secret wrath. he needn't have worried, though; it's early yet, but all signs point to the universe being more solidly on our side in this new year.

when i stepped through my front door the wednesday evening before last, i did so onto my january 8 issue of the new yorker, which had fallen open to the table of contents after being violently shoved through the (more than wide enough) mail slot. i looked down at its ragged edges and crunched corners and thought, first, "if that poem was from the mailman, i'm in bigger trouble than i thought, because he's taken to destroying the things i love," and second, "oooohhh, i see; the mailman is jealous—'cause my boyfriend sent me a leeeeeetter!" you might be interested to know that january is national letter-writing month, making this revelation all cosmic and adorable. but you might just as easily be not interested at all, and so i'll get on with the story. *ahem*

malcolm's name is very pretty in italics, with all its graceful "l"s and round, welcoming vowels. it's so pretty that i sat right down on the hallway floor to gaze at it, and once i did that i had my third thought:

"enron? aw, damn."

fact: i am not business minded. i don't follow stock reports or bone up on mergers or care what steve jobs calls his company, i'm not shocked or whipped into a scandal-ogling frenzy when corporations do things that hurt their shareholders or employees, and i don't expect anyone i invest my money with to care about what happens to me after i've handed over that money. i have a checking account and a savings account, i pay my bills, i avoid stores that utilize business practices i can't get behind, and that is everything that i have or would like to have to do with global markets. so i was pretty sure that there was nothing more i'd be excited to learn about enron, and besides, malcolm had already written an article about enron, and while i appreciate his enthusiasm and his willingness to doggedly worry a subject until the knot of it gives and falls into a simpler, more linear construct . . . actually, i appreciate that rather a lot . . . and that first enron article was only kind of about enron, and it wasn't half bad . . . i mean, i had to at least give it a chance, didn't i? because i trust the guy.

so i leaned back against the front door in my zipped-up coat and started reading, and i was on the third page before i realized i'd never taken my bag off from over my shoulder, that's how right i was to keep the faith.

i won't lie to you, kids, i really don't care about the enron case in and of itself, and nothing malcolm or anybody else says is likely to induce any radical upheaval in the extent to which my eyes glaze over at business speak. but at some point along the way, out of sheer necessity, this piece changes from an article about enron into something that is only shaped like an article about enron, so that it can more fully become the thing it started as. see, knots come undone a loop at a time, but you can't untie one without constantly reminding yourself of the string's continuity; the process of disentangling a knot has to be as much about the whole as the loops. you have to picture the whole, follow that length of material from one end of the snarl through all its ups and downs and ins and outs, imagine the twists and snags at the center, the part that's hidden from sight—and then you have to move that picture to the back of your mind and focus the rest of your attention on one small, isolated section at a time. i can do this with actual, physical knots; malcolm can do it with stories, which, when they're worth telling, are built just like knots. and while nothing, apparently, is gnarlier than american corporate law, and even though business transactions can be vast and fluid and abstract, at the middle of this particular knot there's nothing but us—us, not just a handful of enron employees and some ruined investors. what went wrong with enron goes wrong in countless other realms all the time, and this story works because it, nearly all alone in the googolplex write-ups on the company's downfall, actually points that out.

so, i don't know what to say about jeffrey skilling. i have absolutely no idea, after reading the piece twice and following the public discourse on the case and studying the law review that inspired and informed the article (the key points of said law review being so surprisingly enthralling, by the way, that i'm not even going to comment on its more wince-worthy spelling and grammatical errors—starting now), whether "fraud" is an entirely accurate description of the wrongs that were committed, and i'm not at all convinced that skilling should have been held as singularly responsible for those wrongs as he's been, regardless of how one chooses to categorize them. if i didn't know what good company i was in, i'd probably be deeply troubled by that. instead, i'm going to accept that there are things going on in the world that are currently beyond my grasp and focus on the fractions of the article that, for me, lit up parts of various other big pictures. like this one:

mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. because if you can't find the truth in a mystery—even a mystery shrouded in propaganda—it's not just the fault of the propagandist. it's your fault as well.

ooooooooooh, he's mad. he's also right. naturally, people have already tried to run him up a pole for saying a thing like that, misconstruing (or misrepresenting; i'd swear on a chicago 15th that at least a few of them are definitely misrepresenting) his stance as a defense of enron's practices, which were unquestionably sketchy (if, perhaps, not exactly shady; but again, i'm not certain) and deserving of condemnation. in his own explanation of his intentions malcolm refers to the article as a "semi-defense," but i doubt i'd have phrased it even that strongly. what the work boils down to is a reframing of enron's breakdown, and it should force people to think about why the word "enron" inspires such an instantaneous flood of negativity, and why we feel justified in giving that feeling free reign. i can't imagine the majority of americans not saying skilling deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, but i'm every bit as skeptical that a majority of that majority could enumerate skilling's sins. it's imperative, though, that we force ourselves to understand why we've come to the conclusions we've come to in matters like this—matters where futures, where lives, are at stake—because if we fail at that step every subsequent action is rendered utterly indefensible.

i'm going to walk away from enron for a bit, though, now, and venture into the deep, dark, chilling woods that are home to all of the other ideas the phrase "mystery shrouded in propaganda" brings to mind.

the president's approval rating in the united states right now is, according to the most recent zogby poll, about 30 percent. (i think that's dizzyingly high, but i'm just one girl.) in april of 2003, right after the start of the war in iraq and the "fall" of baghdad, his approval rating was closer to 70 percent. in 2002, when he was busy trying to make his case for invading iraq, approval of the president dropped consistently from its october, 2001, high of nearly 90 percent to a low of just above 50 percent in february of 2003, and then skyrocketed when he declared the end of major combat. but he's been the same president the entire time, and the war in iraq has been the same war the entire time; most reasonable people recognized that the combat hadn't ended in may of 2003 and was unlikely to wind to a close over a day or two just because the president had said so. the problem, i guess, was that too many people at that point weren't being reasonable; but does it make sense to assume they've become more reasonable since then? the nation's shift in attitude regarding the war is being touted as a collective awakening, hundreds of millions of people suddenly coming to their senses about a president's, a cabinet's, a party's persistent self-interest and disingenuousness. but i don't see it that way.

when bush presented his new strategy for iraq on wednesday, the plan that had won him approval ratings twice as high, not to mention reelection, a few years earlier was torched for being neither new nor, in truth, a strategy. it might seem like the american people have woken up, since they're no longer buying the rhetoric and propaganda they'd seemed so moved by in the past. but it's got nothing to do with learned lessons. a few years ago, what the american people wanted was revenge. now, they want their families back. they haven't learned anything except that they don't enjoy putting their money where their mouths are, and what's worse is they can't see it, because they aren't putting any effort into understanding—truly, completely understanding—why they've changed their minds, or why they made the decision they made in the beginning.

in the previously cited law review, jonathan macey says this about group decision-making dynamics:

[O]nce boards of directors have been in place for a while, they are likely to embrace management’s perspective. More specifically, after a decision is made and defended by a board, it will affect future decisions such that those decisions will comport with earlier actions. For example, studies of the decision-making process that contributed to the escalation of the Vietnam War showed that leaders paid more attention to new information that was compatible with the earlier decisions. They tended to ignore information that contradicted those earlier assumptions. As one researcher observed, “there was a tendency, when actions were out of line with ideas for decisionmakers to align their actions.” Once ideas and beliefs become ingrained in the mind of a board of directors, the possibility of altering those beliefs decreases substantially. As Tom Gilovich has argued, “beliefs are like possessions, and when someone challenges our beliefs, it is as if someone criticized our possessions.”

in fact, someone had criticized our possessions, and us ourselves, and had ended 2,973 lives to bring the insult home. everything we knew and trusted had been brought to its knees; our hearts were broken. in order for oversight to be effective, macey says, it must be objective, and there was no hope of the average american citizen approaching objectivity at that time. when management's perspective was that we should invade afghanistan and take out the people who had attacked us, no one would have dreamed of dissenting. but when the management selected a new enemy and proceeded to paint it as every bit as much of a threat as the original enemy, if not worse, when they tried to take 300 million people's fear and confusion and misery into their hands and squeeze it, pressing their thumbs into the tears and punctures until everyone was wailing and blind, it stopped being an issue of choosing whether or not to dissent; under those circumstances, most people, if they don't fight to retain it, lose the ability to think objectively, or at all.

so objective refutations of flimsy assertions not only got buried in obfuscations and distractions and reiterations of catch phrases but were actively ridiculed by party members and newly rabid patriots who couldn't imagine any circumstances under which questioning the direction their leader's finger was pointing in didn't amount to treason. when that finger pointed to war, they didn't seek out information that would prove that such a move was neither inevitable nor necessary, even though such information was abundant, and they didn't embrace those ideas when other people pointed them out again and again and again.

the united states chose bush in 2004, after he ran on a platform of intimidation, threadbare slogans, and a guarantee of business as usual. and now that they've gotten what they asked for, what they've earned by failing to recognize or even look for the truth about a situation they had a massive investment in and should have been scrounging for every shred and scrap of objective intelligence on, what they've built for themselves by failing to just plain think,

they've turned en masse to point their own fingers at the people they placed the order with and say, "how dare you. how dare you be dishonest. how dare you do this to me."

when people thought enron was winning, they didn't want to know anything else. someone was responsible for providing them with information, and the information they were getting from that someone was to their liking; they let that be the end of the story. but the information being furnished wasn't the whole story, and while its purveyors must be held accountable for their actions, it is not their fault that no one involved wanted to admit—or even know—that they were meeting with far less success than they were being led to believe.

as dense as the bush administration's fog of propaganda was, there were elements of information that shed enough light to cut through it. some people affixed them to their pith helmets and marched up and down the street ringing bells, while 200 million people hurled fruits and vegetables and stones and slurs and flags and ribbons at them. those rioting mobs weren't different people at the time of last november's election; they just voted differently. the information they're getting isn't pleasant anymore, and they'd like to hear from someone else. but how much sense does that make? how does that signify an awakening? you could throw every last republican in the country into the grand canyon with a pocket full of trail mix and a pound of jerky and tell them that it's their turn to fight and sacrifice, but of course your problem wouldn't be solved. because the untruth that was sold to you was one you, at the time, said you were willing to pay for, and when that transaction leads to disaster, it's your fault as well. america, like a willful child, has gone from a parent who won't give it a cookie to one it thinks probably will. certain circumstances might change, but the practice that brought them about won't, and when we decide we don't like this cookie in however many years and would actually like a popsicle, we'll switch loyalties again. no objectively reasonable thought in sight, not from sea to shining sea.

i couldn't care less about enron. what i care about is people making solid decisions based on all of the verifiable information at their disposal and then accepting responsibility for the fallout from those decisions. what i care about is blame being assigned as it should be, by people who are in a position to know where that blame honestly lies.

jeffrey skilling is taking a hard, more or less solitary fall for a collective wrong that involved all kinds of irresponsible investments and convoluted hand-offs and insufficient models and impossibly unreadable documents—but he's been convicted of fraud. i don't know enough about corporate law to say whether or not, based on what i've read, that's a crime he committed, but i, like malcolm, would like his conviction and associated sentence to be something no one had any questions about. i'd like as many convictions as possible to go that way. whatever your interest in business, whatever country you hang your hat in, you owe it to, at the absolute least, yourself to make certain your legal system is operating in a just and clear-eyed manner.

sometimes ours fails. but it's our fault as well, and i am pointing my very angry finger at an extremely broad population of people who i'm afraid will never, ever care about a word i'm saying.

*sigh* i won't fix the universe tonight, anyway. so i'll close my little rant with this: all of you out there fighting the good fight, working like hell to think with the best parts of your heads, trying to hold yourselves and each other up while you watch the world around you fail you and fail you and fail you, doing all you can to make sense of it even when you have no reason to hope that it will ever make sense: you've got an extremely loyal pal.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was prepared to march back into the new yorker's copyediting department this week and start rapping the staff upon their knuckles with their red pens, which they seem to have lost interest in striving to be worthy of. some errors i can compel myself to make peace with—inappropriate spacing, dropped hyphens at word breaks at the ends of lines (oh yes, it's happened), things of that ilk, which would perhaps only be present in the final proof—but other things i can't overlook. take, for instance, this sentence on page 74 of the july 31 issue (i did mention, didn't i, that i have fallen a little bit behind?):

But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was begging or and cleaned his face with her skirt.

DO YOU SEE??????? for shame! for shame! there's no excuse for that one. and then there's this, from hertzberg's "talk of the town" piece in the august 7 & 14 issue:

It defines "Democrat n" as "A Democratic Party member" and "Democratic adj" as "Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party," but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—"Democrat Party n" or "Democrat adj".

was the united states under british rule for a brief period this past summer? because the end of that sentence certainly was.* and while i officially approve of the magazine's apparent decision to stop italicizing punctuation marks immediately following italicized text, on page 68 of the same issue there is an italicized semicolon following "the atlantic monthly"—and then, farther down on the same page, a non-italicized comma following the same title. what am i to think, people, of such chaos? is it a surreptitious reference to the anarchy overseas? was the hot summer sun creating a blinding glare on the office's computer screens and printed matter for two or three straight weeks? is there a method to this madness that is simply not cognoscible by my feeble, daylight-starved brain? believe me, i'd be thrilled to learn that the only problem is that i don't get it, and there are plenty of things that leave me purely confused. walk backwards through time with me so that we may revisit the july 31 issue and explore this sentence on page 83:

Its undulating glass-and-steel swoops and swells as if it were not a solid mass but a billowing length of fabric.

what is happening with those hyphens? a bit melodramatic, aren't they? are they really necessary? really? really? i just don't know anymore.

so i gnashed my teeth and rent my garments, but in the end those dozens of knuckles were spared; i am still kicking an issue of the new yorker back and forth across my apartment, but, i suppose thankfully, my rage is directed at an idea and not a technicality.

listen, i dig john updike. i do. i bought a paperback copy of marry me for a quarter at a library sale when i was in high school, and i've been collecting his titles like baseball cards ever since. i dig him so much that when the early stories came out a few years ago, i bought a hardcover copy for my cousin instead of for myself, because my cousin loves great stories but had never read anything by updike, and that made me a whole lot sadder than not owning that book ever could have. i was working at david r. godine, inc., the parent publisher of the black sparrow imprint, when the golden west: hollywood stories—a work updike wrote the introduction for—was in the final stages of its production, and one day the editor handed me a packet addressed to updike and asked me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out. i scribbled the address down on a scrap of paper and carried it around in my pocket for weeks, thinking maybe i would sneak out to his house in the dead of night and leave some sort of present on his lawn to thank him for all he'd done for me and the rest of the world. i'm a fan, right down to the tips of my tippy little toes.

today, though, i have no choice but to let him have it. i don't think i can bring myself to hit him actually, you know, in the face, but i am going to hit him somewhere about the face, or at least once very soundly on the back of the head. in a minute. i'm winding up.

in his july 31 review of sara gruen's water for elephants, a book about a depression-era traveling circus (which is more than enough to hook me; i *heart* carnies), updike says some pleasant things about the author and her firm grasp on 1930s-sideshow vernacular, and that's all well and good. but then he says . . . i mean, maybe i shouldn't be bothered, probably i shouldn't be at all surprised, but after all of the terrible things that have happened in the recent history of our world, after all of the unspeakable things that have been happening without pause since the world became a world, to say a thing like this:

Recalling, near the end of his life, his work as a veterinarian for the circus and his love for a colleague's wife, [Jacob Jankowski, the novel's narrator and protagonist] comes off as so relentlessly decent—an unwavering defender of animals, women, dwarves, cripples, and assorted ethnic groups—that he ceases to be interesting as a character.

maybe, given all the updike characters i've crawled into bed with over the years, it is exactly what i should have expected—but i still hate it. nobody likes a cloyingly sweet goody two-shoes, and a character with one earnestly altruistic dimension might be unbelievable, but there's a problem when we start viewing "relentlessly decent" individuals as unreadably dull. an unwavering defender of the weak and disenfranchised isn't tedious, he's, you know, jesus—or bahá’u’lláh or guru nanak dev, choose your path, they're more or less all rooted in those ideals. rooted; they get twisted, sometimes, up toward the branches, where people who are not relentlessly decent are able to get their hands on them. but those are lasting characters, wouldn't you say? captivating enough to have kept people turning the pages for the past couple of centuries, or millenia. i know i wouldn't die of ennui if a few more people started emulating those characters, those thoroughly decent characters. you know who wasn't an unwavering defender of cripples and assorted ethnic groups? hitler. and he was a hell of a character, sure, but not one i want to read any more stories about. ever. if my choices are "morally conflicted/challenged" and "Not Interesting To Writers," well, i guess it was for the best that i never sat up all night tying a perfect bow on the perfectly wrapped gift i never left in a certain wordsmith's front yard. *sniff*

*smack*

there, i've done it. now you sit in that corner, john updike, and think about what you've done.

oh, and, um, when you're finished thinking, um, do you think maybe you could sign my copy of pigeon feathers? that part toward the end, where david's mother is trying to make him see that the earth isn't any less a gift from god if god is an invention of humans, when she's talking about forcing yourself to pay attention to the evidence . . . it just kills me. she was a good woman, wasn't she, that elsie kern? so worried about the fertilizer hurting the earthworms . . . i could read about her forever.


* i do love the pun, i truly do, and you can't take that away from me.


update, 1/12/07, 1:11 PM: i am not alone in my love/hate/love/love/hate affair with updike; jared young has just recently offered up a beautiful work of sardonically loathesome adulation. oh, johnny boy; we're huggin' ya . . . but we're hittin' ya!

oh me of little faith . . .

my twenty-seventh year, which, if you'll recall, i feared and half believed would be my last, has wound to a tidy and shockingly satisfactory close. it brought me a boffo job that exceeded all my craziest, most fevered, most tequila-soaked hopes; it brought me a new and improved home that i don't have to share with anyone or anyone's evil parrot; it even brought me a smaller dress size and an unsuspected gift for making excellent vegan desserts, two things i would never have expected to receive simultaneously. and now i'm twenty-eight, and nothing's ever perfect, but some things are a lot better than you think they'll be.

earlier this month i passive-aggressively scolded my very best beloved secret boyfriend malcolm gladwell for forgetting my birthday, partly out of hurt and partly because it seemed so unlike him to do such a thing—and, of course, it would have been unlike him, if it had happened. but it was all me jumping to conclusions, which is only a little bit unlike me and usually works out o.k. in the end.

i am, as ever, about three and a half months behind on the new yorker. the blasted things just keep coming and coming, and i keep picking them up out of the mail pile and stashing them at the bottom of the magazine pile because i'm determined to fight my way through the whole wretched mess without cheating or skimping or missing anything, and because my mother pays to renew that subscription every october and four months' worth of issues is equal to close to half of a year's renewal fee and i'm sure as hell not tossing my mother's hard-earned money out with the recycling without at least leafing through it on a sunday morning . . . and so i didn't notice that malcolm had written a perfectly lovely article for the media issue, which just happened to come out the week of my birthday. shame on me. and even though malcolm would have been well within his rights to point out that he hadn't received any special packages from me back in the beginning of september, he took the high, phlegmatic road and instead brought the article up—very gently—on his blog.

i don't know if it's me becoming increasingly smitten or an objective editorial observation, and odds are there's no way for me to be sure, but malcolm's writing, from a purely stylistic standpoint, seems to have improved exponentially over the past few years. (i still lose my breath over "parlor pinks," but that's neither here nor there.) he's much better about not talking to us as though he isn't sure we'll understand him, and while his reporting has always been straight, his wrap-ups have become tighter and cleaner—unreporterly enough to make you sure of where he stands, but not so swayed that you feel as if he's trying to convince you of something. his emotional saturation has found the just-right spot typically reserved for the third bowl of porridge. and he makes jokes now, and they're good, subtle, quirky jokes . . . the work's gone all sparkly, and i'm just over the moon about the whole situation. and then, of course, there are the things he actually chooses to write about, which are all fat and yummy and made so sad by the fact that he isn't pitching them to me from my sofa.

but he is sending them to me for my birthday, and my present went like this: some men have come up with an algorithm that allows them to predict, far more accurately than anyone else has ever been able to predict, which screenplays are likely to be made into hugely successful movies and which can expect to grow up into movies that will meet with moderate to meager, to zero, success. here's the comment i made at his blog prior to reading the article:

i suppose once i read the piece i'll have a better understanding of how the network monitors public opinion in order to assess a movie's likely turnout. i have a feeling, though, that it would be similar to . . . looking at movies that have been box-office hits and seeking similar aspects. how long could a system like that really be successful at pitching films to a single generation?

on a more selfish note, my personal movie preferences are different enough from most people's that i might dread a tool like this being put into widespread use. i understand that most movies are already, and always will be, made based on the likelihood of a substantial return; but if production studios start selecting screenplays based on algorithms, won't that only increase the odds of films that may not appeal to the sensibilities of the vast majority but that are still quite good and deserve to be made, well, not getting made? the blockbusters are rarely the works that stand the test of time. a system like this would probably benefit the executives, it's true, but the rest of us might miss out on a lot of strong works of art.

i felt fine saying that, because malcolm and i have that kind of open, trusting, imaginary relationship where we can disagree with each other without fear of excessive defensiveness or retaliation. it's a very warm feeling. besides, he knows i live on the fringes. and he also knew that i would race right home and read my present start to finish and form a far more balanced and informed opinion, because that's the kind of girl i am. and that's exactly what i've done.

here are the ten top-grossing movies of 2006 (thus far):

1. pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest

2. cars

3. x-men: the last stand

4. the da vinci code

5. superman returns

6. ice age: the meltdown

7. over the hedge

8. talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby

9. click

10. mission: impossible III (or miiii, as i shall refer to it until the end of days)

here are the movies out of those ten that i saw:









i did want to see x-men, because i am weak for all things comic-booky (and am FREAKING OUT about the new spider-man, oh, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!), but none of the others, and i'm pretty sure i've never even heard of click. am i a movie snob? perhaps, but i don't believe so. what i am, according to "mr. brown," a primary source for the article and one of the neural network's developers, is an intelligent niche viewer drawn to movies that are more european in style than american. not snobby, my darlings, just misplaced, and i've known that for ages. my favorite movies are typically french, lynchian, or just plain odd, and while some people seem to think that i feel that makes me better than them, the only thing i do feel it makes me is isolated. i have to scroll down to number 41 on that list just to find a movie i actually went all the way to a theater to see, and i had to see it alone. do i think the epagogix—the neural network under discussion—would have deemed little miss sunshine worthy of production? well, there is a female in occasional distress, and that female is a young child who encourages the adults around her to break free of society's chains and find joy in their lives, and there were some drugs and the faintest whiff of pornographic material, and there was some comedy, and some bonding and redemption—but the redemption was intensely personal and required mass public humiliation, and the comedy was dark and involved a family member's corpse, and the porn and drugs were nowhere near explicit, and nothing exploded, and while i'm pretty sure someone wore a hat, it was hardly a memorable hat.

no algorithm would have fully endorsed this screenplay, or that of the princess and the warrior, which has, by this point in my endless chain of viewings, practically taught me german. i doubt epagogix would have great things to say about rushmore or the purple rose of cairo or the big kahuna or farewell, my concubine, or any other movie on my shelf. but i love these movies and feel i owe them a great debt. i would like to buy all of the actors and writers and directors and editors involved in the making of these movies fuzzy blankets and delicious treats. and honestly, does anyone want another da vinci code? ever?

so i became rather glum, listening to malcolm tell me in his straight, reporterly fashion how no studio would ever have to make another movie that would gross under $50 million because math is fantastic, and listening to mr. brown and mr. pink tell me that my european attitudes are ill suited to my parochial american environs, and listening to the snide ghosts of moviegoers coast to coast telling me that car chases and costly effects and weak women will always triumph over understated dialogue and carefully lit stills and flawed characters who struggle and strive and sometimes still fail. i mean, brokeback mountain came in 22nd in 2005, and everyone was talking about that movie. it came in four behind fun with dick and jane. who saw fun with dick and jane? who the hell saw that movie? why did any of you go to see that movie?

all right, maybe i'm a teensy bit, just the ittiest bit, of a movie snob. but i won't apologize for loving beautiful stories and impressive craftsmanship—i won't apologize for demanding art, instead of settling for distraction, even engaging distraction. and i became glummer and glummer, thinking maybe i was right to argue off the bat, and maybe i wouldn't be able to go back at the end and say, i'm sorry, muffin, i really should have read that article before i did that thing i do with the jumping and the assuming and whatnot,

and then i came to the conclusion:

the neural network had one master, the market, and anwered one question: how do you get to bigger box-office? but once a movie had made you vulnerable—once you couldn't even retell the damn story without getting emotional—you couldn't be content with just one master anymore.

that was the thing about the formula: it didn't make the task of filmmaking easier. it made it harder. . . . the epagogix team . . . were technicians with tools: computer programs and analytical systems and proprietary software that calculated mathematical relationships among a laundry list of structural variables. . . . a kamesian had only to read lord kames to appreciate the distinction. the most arrogant man in the world was a terrible writer: clunky, dense, prolix. he knew the rules of art. but that didn't make him an artist.

mr. brown spoke last. "i don't think it needs to be a big-budget picture," he said. "i think we do what we can with the original script to make it a strong story, with an ending that is memorable, and then do a slow release. a low-budget picture. one that builds through word of mouth—something like that."

well, what do you know. everyone was on my side the whole time. and that way of being wrong, my lovelies, is always the best gift ever—always; but malcolm sent it with a "prolix," and while it was a grand and profoundly moving gesture, i have no idea how he expects to top it next year. as i've seen, though, as i'm sure we've all seen at one time or another, a year can knock the socks right off you. so whatever presents are coming my way, i'll take them.




postscript, 12/3/06: the plain fact is, the world will never need epagogix--because it has jerry.