Steve Reads

Thanks to my employer for hooking me up with a beautiful MacBook Pro and two huge external monitors.

If you’re trying to do the thing mentioned in the title of this post, you’ve probably already found the perfectly comprehensive post I’m going to link to. If not, it’s this guy right here. The Cliffs Notes version is as follows:

• Your MacBook Pro has one Mini-DVI port. You want to drive two external monitors. Problem.
• So buy two Diamond BVU195 USB display adapters. These allow you to connect DVI cables to USB cables, of which your MacBook Pro has a few.
• “But wait!” you might say here, “I only have two or so USB ports, and I want to drive two external monitors. How will I plug in an external mouse and an iPod/iPhone, and those two monitors?” Fear not: here’s where you buy a USB hub. I got a 7-port Belkin external USB hub for $28. I run a cable from there to a USB port on the MacBook Pro, and I’m done.

To review: up to here, you’re running one DVI cable from each of your monitors into a DVI-to-USB adapter from Diamond. Then you run the resulting USB cables into a USB hub. Then you run one cable from the hub into your MacBook Pro. Now both your monitors, in summary, are being run off a single USB port on your MacBook Pro. Sexy.

The final step, again as detailed in that article, is

• Download and install the DisplayLink OS X drivers. Now you can use System Preferences to arrange your three monitors — two external, one built-in — in any configuration you like.

FIN.

I would include pictures of how these things all work on my end, but the fellow who wrote that piece included everything I would have.

My only question now is how to get control of the ridiculous quantities of cabling I have laying on my desk at work as a result of these contortions:

Now that is what I’m talking about: a classic Murakami novel, with

• a disaffected narrator fumbling vaguely through his days
• the wall between our world and a much darker one — a world which may be within our own souls OMG — falling away
• some sex (though less than you might expect from Murakami)
• a semi-pulpy story that pulls you along effortlessly

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the dude’s cat disappears, and then shit gets real. (Oh, and by the way: he spends a lot of time at the bottom of a well. So there’s that.)

In Kafka on the Shore, cats start disappearing from this one neighborhood, and a retarded guy with special powers chats up the cats’ cat friends, and then shit gets real.

In After the Quake, people’s empty lives contribute in some undefined way to the Kobe earthquake; at the very end we see that our characters are tentatively bringing themselves out into the world again, becoming the sort of people they know they should be.

In After Dark, the boundary between the Dark World and this one is paper thin, and sometimes disappears altogether. Sometimes that boundary exists on a physical device that gets left in a convenience-store refrigerator (for instance).

So you see a pattern forming. There may have been a time in my life when I would have derisively called Murakami “formulaic,” but that word is actually an insult to the power of a good formula. Philip Roth succeeded for a good forty years by adhering to the Jewish-author-with-inexplicable-sex-appeal-exploring-masculinity formula. (All right, that’s kind of a complicated formula. Roth was a sui generis author.) Jazz music has evolved from one formula to another. Country music, from what I can tell, has been the same formula interpreted in different ways for half a century (cheatin’ woman, lonesome highway, etc.). I’ve listened to a lot of Frank Sinatra, and it was all — down to particular trills — the same formula. But man was that a good formula. The formula is essentially arbitrary; I have a book in queue — Georges Perec’s A Void — whose guiding premise, if I’m not mistaken, is that all such formulas are arbitrary, so why not pick one that’s truly arbitrary (don’t use the letter ‘e’ at all) and see what you can do within it.

As ever, it’s what you do with the formula. Murakami knows how to fold, spindle, mutilate, and combine genres like no one else. Dance Dance Dance should maybe be called a supernatural mystery novel, in a way that really only makes sense if you’ve read a bunch of other Murakami. Our narrator — really a pretty excellent guy, which you can’t often say about Murakami protagonists — wakes up more than a little freaked out one day after an old lover calls to him in his sleep. She haunts him, but from where? From beyond the grave? Is she dead? Is that her ghost?

Anyway, this woman — Kiki is her name — is calling to him, and he knows exactly what he has to do: he must return to the hotel where he and Kiki spent the formative months of their relationship. It is a creepy, bizarre hotel, where everything is just a bit askew. I couldn’t help picturing an old ramshackle house, lightning flickering behind it during deepest nighttime. Our narrator returns to the hotel to find that it’s been replaced with a gleaming skyscraper of a hotel whose name is the same as the old one it replaced. Why would they bother to keep the name the same?

Here we spin off in a few directions. First of all, we run down the “I don’t know what this monkey business is, gumshoe, but I’m sure as George Peppard gonna find out what happened to that old hotel” direction. Might there be a yakuza connection? Only time will tell.

(Actually time won’t tell: it’s a Murakami novel, and I still have no idea by the end whether the mafia were involved. Just throwing that out there so that I don’t mis-set expectations.)

Second, our narrator sees a beautiful 13-year-old girl sitting in the bar with her mother. Hijinx ensue. Turns out that the mother is brilliant but spacey, and leaves her daughter all over the world while she — the mother — hops on planes to Kathmandu or wherever. The daughter is left to fend for herself. She is, as you might expect, world-weary and vulnerable and … well … motherless.

The friendship that develops between the narrator and this girl is the most convincing character development I’ve found in Murakami. He feels tenderly toward her — sort of fatherly, but more like a wise older friend. She’s a classic teenager: sullen, believing everyone else is so lame, smacking gum loudly and wearing her headphones whenever everyone else just gets too lame for words. Their relationship is very captivating, perhaps because I put myself back in the mode of a teenage boy who absolutely would have fallen in love with this gorgeous girl; back in those days, I wanted so badly for the uninterested girl to be interested. The narrator puts himself in that mode, too. Somehow it’s never creepy: our 34-year-old narrator doesn’t lust after a 13-year-old girl at all. They’re Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with a window into the underworld.

We start out wanting to know where Kiki is, but we end up wanting to know so much besides. The old hotel, for instance, seems to have been reincarnated on the 16th floor of the new hotel, but you can’t always see it; what’s that about? To take another example, our narrator has transcendent — may I say otherworldly? — sex with a beautiful, high-priced prostitute (oh Haruki, I can’t quit you), who subsequently ends up dead, strangled with a black stocking. How does our narrator — a journalistic hack, who describes his job as “shoveling cultural snow” — afford such an exclusive call girl? Well, turns out he’s reconnected with a high-school friend of his who’s become a big movie star. (I pictured my friend Ben in this role — Ben of the million-watt smile and charm to match.) They’re hanging out, drinking, when the movie star suggests that they “get a couple of girls.” Yadda yadda yadda, so on and so forth, our narrator and the escort are washing up together. Soon enough she’s dead. What’s that about?

Often in these sorts of situations, Murakami would take the lazy route out: put some balls in the air, then walk off to see what’s on TV. Here he finishes the juggling routine. The result is an uncannily gripping story that’s also emotionally affecting. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.

…apparently. Thanks to my friend Paul for passing along that link.

I think a rather enormous swath of libertarian arguments deserve the following response: you think aggregate economic output is important, but you care much less about the distribution of society’s wealth than I do. You seem to be concerned about spending money on, say, health care, and you make a lot of noise about how society can’t afford this or that. But when you drill down from the abstract principle to the detail, it all falls apart: society can afford to give free vaccinations to poor American children, or anti-malarial netting to African villages, or free lunches to every American schoolchild. Everyone knows we can afford this, because we afford spectacular amounts of waste on lots of things that do nothing to improve the lot of humankind.

Do I want to play the self-interest game here? No, I don’t, but I will for a moment. I could make a plausible argument, occupying just as many pages as Epstein’s Mortal Peril, arguing that if we help out the poor in this country, we’ll make life better off for even the wealthy folks. Poor people spend a larger fraction of their income than the wealthy do. Give a poor person an extra dollar, and more of that dollar will go back into the economy than if a wealthy person gets that dollar. Help poor countries build sustainable infrastructure, and maybe they’ll be able to start buying cars — our cars! — rather than subsistence goods. I could bring in bits of the theory behind microfinance: the increased productivity from loaning someone a sewing machine, when all she’s previously had is a needle and thread, is much greater than the increase when you step up from a fleet of sewing machines to an industrial sewing operation. So investment in the poor may, in principle anyway, be better for investors than investment in wealthier folks. (One would have to take lots of detours along the way to explain why Citibank isn’t in a rush to fund sewing operations in remote Indian villages. I hinted in that direction in my review of that microfinance book.)

You know the counterarguments here just as well as I do: money to poor people will just go to drink and drugs; money to poor countries will just go to feather the nests of corrupt warlords. I could fill up my notional book responding to these arguments. I could fill it up with other arguments besides; I might, for instance, take up the thread that Jacob Hacker started in The Great Risk Shift: in the decades after World War II, corporations and the government bore more risk on our behalf, and the result was the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen; in the last three decades, Americans have had to handle more of that risk on their own, which makes them frightened, which makes them hoard money and avoid things that capitalist economies are supposed to treasure, like starting new businesses. I might pull in some of Paul Krugman’s movement-defining Conscience of a Liberal, and place the blame for this risk shift on the decline of unions. Then I might bow in the direction of Tom Geoghegan’s Which Side Are You On?, exploring the causes and consequences of this union decline (hint: the decline was not accidental, and it’s not irreversible, though things certainly don’t look good for unions).

The general arc of this notional book might be that people like Epstein focus far too much on what individual economic actors do, too little on the economic institutions that make their actions possible, and too little on how interdependent our economic lives are. I might bring in one of my favorite books of recent years, Tom Slee’s (ironically titled, if it’s not clear) No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart, which argues these points more clearly than anything else I’ve read. You can’t afford health insurance? Neither can a lot of your countrymen; insurance suffers from a well-known death spiral that makes this entirely predictable. It’s not safe for your kids to walk to school? It may well be because other parents decided it wasn’t safe for their kids to walk to school, so they drove their kids to school instead — thereby leaving unprotected the kids who still chose to walk.

In the face of this economic picture that suggests the need for coordinated action, all Epstein and his libertarian ilk can give us is the purported Ultimate Justice of the contract that makes us all equal before the law. “The law, in its majestic equality,” wrote Anatole France, “forbids the rich as well as the the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

This notional book of mine, based on certain core beliefs I hold about our responsibility to the least fortunate, would have just as much inherent plausibility as Richard Epstein’s. I’m not convinced that either his book or mine would sway anyone. I suspect that you either come at the world thinking that people get what they deserve (hence that their suffering is their own fault), and that no one else can give you bootstraps to pull up; or that there’s a great measure of chance in everything we do, and that it’s the job of a just society to insulate people from risks beyond their control. I fall squarely into the latter camp. When phrased that way, I think most Americans would come along with me. Maybe this book should be something more than notional.

As part of my 2K10 Re-Engage With Reading! program, I’m reading a few novels in a row to get the reading muscles back from atrophy. The Sea, Norwegian Wood, and now Dance Dance Dance. This one’s getting off to a great start: part Murakami Weird, part Murakami Disaffected Narrator, part supernatural detective novel. Just great.

A couple quotes that have made me laugh so far (and really, I don’t laugh out loud at books very often at all):

First, about the narrator’s schoolmate, who’s now a movie star:

Although, come to think of it, in real life the guy had been pretty much like the parts he played. He was nice enough, but who actually knew anything about him? We were in the same class during junior high school, and once we shared the same lab table on a science experiment. We were friendly. But even back then he was too nice to be real — just like in his movies. Girls were already falling all over him. If he talked to them, their eyes would go moist. If he lit a Bunsen burner with those graceful hands of his, it was like the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

His mind is wandering off, constructing a movie scene in Egypt for some reason (after he’s, for some similarly unknown reason, told a woman about swim clubs in ancient Egypt):

Cut to a spectacle scene on the order of The Bathing Beauty or The King and I. My classmate and the princes and princesses in a grand synchronized swim routine in celebration of the Pharaoh’s birthday. The Pharaoh is overjoyed, which further boosts the youth’s stock. Still, he doesn’t let it got to his head. He’s a paragon of humility. He smiles the same as ever, and pisses elegantly. When a lady-in-waiting slips under the covers with him, he spends a full one hour on foreplay, brings her all the way to climax, then afterward strokes her hair and says, “You’re the best.” He’s a good guy.

Oh, and right now — page 84 — he’s talking with a guy (incorporeal being? I don’t know) who’s dressed in a sheep outfit. The narrator refers to him as “Sheep Man.” Soooo … that happened.

This is a romance novel for dudes, which is to say that it’s sensitive-dude pornography. Having read by now six Murakami novels, I’m realizing that this is something of a staple for him. By about 1/3 of the way through Norwegian Wood, I realized that this was going to be another Murakami novel in which the narrator receives a handjob for no good reason at all. In fact the reason for Unmotivated Norwegian Wood Handjob Number 1 is about the same as the reason for Unmotivated Kafka On The Shore Handjob Number 1 (I have a classification scheme set up for easy referencing later on): our narrator is acting all pent-up, and the endlessly accommodating woman asks him if he’d like a little consequence-free release, no questions asked. He says sure, and returns to bed without feeling any obligation to reciprocate, engage in future sexual activity, or be emotionally committed to his momentary partner. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: pornography contains “fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world.” So does Norwegian Wood.

Indeed, the main thread in Norwegian Wood features our laconic narrator, Toru, hanging out at a university in Tokyo while an incredibly cute, sexually adventurous girl with delicious legs who wears short skirts, named Midori, constantly propositions him with one utterly depraved sexual fantasy after another. But our narrator can’t commit to Midori, because he’s deeply in love with a very unstable woman named Naoko who spends the book in a sanatorium. He holds off on having sex with Midori because of his commitment to Naoko. The narrator and Midori literally sleep together, and perform various sex acts with one another, but never the One True Act; somehow this makes it all okay. It is all okay because, again, this is dude pornography. Periodically our narrator heads into the mountains to visit Naoko. One night, for reasons that are never made clear, Naoko visits our narrator at his bedside, removes her clothes, demonstrates her Platonically perfect body (described by Murakami in really wonderful detail) to him, wraps back up and heads to sleep. Was she sleepwalking? Was it deliberate? No one knows. This is one of Murakami’s trademarks: little mysterious things that add spice to the story but don’t really further it. It just happens that this bit of spice also adds sex, or a bit of a tease.

Naoko’s roommate in the sanatorium is an older lady named Reiko who has the hots for Toru, and says so to Naoko and to Toru quite openly. Since this is a work of literary pornography, Naoko never seems to become jealous over this. (Indeed, I’m half-convinced that Murakami made Naoko mentally unstable so that you wouldn’t question her utter lack of standard human emotions, such as jealousy.) It’s also a work of what you might call the “pornography of self-control,” another Murakami hallmark: Toru can visit these two attractive ladies, and can spend his days with the freewheeling Midori, without once being overtaken by desire. He has lots of sex with lots of women — sometimes in the company of his handsome college dormmate, who takes Toru with him out on the town — but those nerves of his are made of steel.

When he’s not ambling about with Midori, who describes all the naughty things she wants him to do to her, he’s drinking himself into oblivion over the mentally unstable Naoko. The man does a lot of drinking. Sometimes he’s so distraught that he becomes a hobo, wandering from town to town with a sleeping bag on his back, periodically getting booted out by the townspeople and other times getting treated to a hot meal by a friendly stranger. This is where dude porn meets Tom Waits.

But it’s sensitive-dude porn, mind you, so it can’t just be aimless sex. Toru’s dormmate, Nagasawa, is dating a spectacularly interesting, self-sacrificing woman named Hatsumi, whom our narrator loves chatting with, but whom Nagasawa takes every opportunity to cheat on. Hatsumi knows all this, and somehow manages to not be completely distraught; she intends to spend her life with Nagasawa. Hatsumi turns to Toru to help her figure out what to do; Toru counsels her to dump Nagasawa’s philandering ass. Toru is, after all, a sensitive dude.

Over the past couple years, I’ve noticed just how many novels by male authors contain large elements of the same sort of sex fantasy. At points these novels even veer into rape fantasies; Norwegian Wood has a good bit of that, as does Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence contains a thread about two beautiful women who can’t keep their hands off each other and seem open to inviting — eager to invite, even — a man into their bed; in Norwegian Wood, the reader is constantly in a similar state of erotic expectation whenever Toru is in the same room with Naoko and Reiko. It’s fundamental to the literary-dude-porn genre that women be a) mildly lesbian, or at least bi-curious; b) absolutely forward about their intentions (perhaps appealing to the books’ consumers, whom the authors assume to be quiet, shy types); c) endlessly complimentary about the size of their male partners’ members; d) liberated as to sexual technique; e) able to keep emotion and sex entirely separate. Sex, in the literary-dude-porn genre, then becomes something extracurricular and consequence-free. Our narrator can have sex and mere moments later walk off to make a sandwich; his ladies remain where they were, perhaps casually making out with one another. He may fall in love with them — in The Dying Animal, our narrator loses all control in his twilight years — but the sex can be put in its own box.

If it’s not clear, I actually found Norwegian Wood an enjoyable read. But realize what it is before you get into it. It’s sensitive-dude porn. With a few more sex scenes, just a bit less emotion, and a bit more of the classic Murakami strangeness, you’d end up with something like Nicholson Baker’s Fermata (in which our hero finds a way to freeze time for everyone but himself, and uses this newfound power to do unspeakable things to women’s immobile bodies).

Norwegian Wood is a rather large departure for Murakami. Other novels of his, particularly The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka On The Shore, are entrancingly weird — so weird that they often get casually slapped with the label ‘metaphysical.’ Norwegian Wood isn’t weird; apart from a high number of suicides and more sex than the world we’re used to, it’s a fairly common story. If you want to know who Murakami is, I’d recommend starting with Wind-Up Bird or Kafka. If you’re a sensitive literary dude and want some sensitive-literary-dude porn, give Norwegian Wood a try.

Via Matt Yglesias’s Twitter feed: a really disgusting round of conservative class-baiting, mocking those who lack insurance and suffer as a result.

It’s really quite simple, and it’s really been quite simple for at least this past year: there are those who care about protecting the uninsured, and there are those who don’t. There are those who think it’s a problem that 30 million or more Americans suffer and die needlessly, and there are those who don’t. If you see it as a problem, you search for ways to solve it; if you don’t, you don’t.

Of course there are those who believe that government just cannot solve the problem. But these folks have proposed remarkably thin gruel in response; e.g., the Republican “plan” that will only cover 3 million people. The only reasonable conclusion is that Republicans don’t think there’s an actual problem.

If they could come right and say that they don’t care about the uninsured, at least we’d have some honesty. But they know that Americans want health coverage for their uninsured countrymen. So they have to come up with “solutions” that don’t actually solve anything and cost very little. Health insurance, in this mode, is about marketing rather than solving problems: Republicans can continue to market themselves as the party of fiscal discipline and mock Democrats as “tax and spend”, all without actually doing anything.

So again, the choice is simple: either you think it’s a problem that tens of millions of your fellow-Americans lack insurance and can go bankrupt just by getting sick, or you don’t. If you do, there’s one political party that’s trying to solve it, and one that views the uninsured as a marketing tool. If you believe that the uninsured are a problem, but you have problems with the Democrats’ plans, do all you can to fix those plans. Don’t look to Republicans for a solution, because all they have to offer is empty sloganeering.

Matt Yglesias writes that he “hear[s]” the Chilean earthquake is 1000x more powerful than the Haitian one. I get the feeling that a lot of people know that the Richter scale is logarithmic, but it’s not clear that they always know how to convert that back into raw units. The estimable Mr. Yglesias, for instance, shouldn’t need to “hear” that it’s 1000x more powerful; he should be able to figure it out on his own. (I get similarly vexed when people can’t compute tips at restaurants on their own.)

The USGS pages on the Chilean earthquake and the Haitian one mention their magnitudes (8.8 and 7.0, respectively) and give a helpful explanation of what that means:

Seismologists indicate the size of an earthquake in units of magnitude. There are many different ways that magnitude is measured from seismograms because each method only works over a limited range of magnitudes and with different types of seismometers. Some methods are based on body waves (which travel deep within the structure of the earth), some based on surface waves (which primarily travel along the uppermost layers of the earth), and some based on completely different methodologies. However, all of the methods are designed to agree well over the range of magnitudes where they are reliable.

Preliminary magnitudes based on incomplete but available data are sometimes estimated and reported. For example, the Tsumani Centers will calculate a preliminary magnitude and location for an event as soon as sufficient data is available to make an estimate. In this case, time is of the essence in order to broadcast a warning if tsunami waves are likely to be generated by the event. Such preliminary magnitudes, which may be off by one-half magnitude unit or more, are sufficient for the purpose at hand, and are superseded by more exact estimates of magnitude as more data become available.

Earthquake magnitude is a logarithmic measure of earthquake size. In simple terms, this means that at the same distance from the earthquake, the shaking will be 10 times as large during a magnitude 5 earthquake as during a magnitude 4 earthquake. The total amount of energy released by the earthquake, however, goes up by a factor of 32.

So then the amount of shaking in a magnitude-7.0 earthquake is 10⁷, which is 10 million. A magnitude-8.8 earthquake will feature 10^1.8 times as much shaking as the magnitude-7.0 one. 10^1.8 is less than 10², which is 100. So the amount of shaking is nowhere near the 1000x that Mr. Yglesias heard.

But then the USGS also notes that the amount of energy goes up by a factor of 32 for every 1-unit increase in the Richter scale. So then there’s 32^1.8, or 512x, as much energy in a magnitude-8.8 earthquake as in a magnitude-7 one.

P.S.: I found an Ezra Klein piece that I was looking for before, where he suggests that he also doesn’t know what “logarithmic scale” means:

The devastation in Haiti was not just because the earth shook, and hard. The quake there was 7.0. Harder than the 6.5 quake that hit Northern California a day before (remember, though, that the Richter scale is logarithmic, so 7 is many times harder than 6.5)

If we’re talking about the magnitude of the shaking, the Haiti quake was 10^.5 times as strong as the California one. You may remember that “x to the 0.5 power” is the same as “the square root of x.” To get your back-of-the-envelope-math muscles working, recall that “the square root of x” means “the number which, when squared, equals x.” The square of 3 is less than 10, and the square of 4 is more than 10, so the Haiti quake shook things somewhere between 3 and 4 times as hard as the California quake. As measured by raw power, Haiti’s quake was 32^0.5 times as powerful as California’s, meaning somewhere between 5 and 6 times as powerful.

“Many” has no exact definition, of course, but I doubt most people would say that “many times harder” means “between 3x and 6x as hard.”

Dear Phoenix:

Here’s your list of available local coffeeshops:

1. Ula Café
2. 1369 Coffee House
3. Diesel Cafe
4. 2nd Cup Café
5. Espresso Royale Caffe
6. True Grounds

You are missing so many cafés. 1369 isn’t even the best café in Central Square; that honor has to go to Toscanini’s. Up in Harvard Square is Café Pamplona, which possibly had the first espresso maker in Cambridge. A bit further into Harvard Square is Crema. A 10-minute walk up the street toward Porter is Simon’s.

Head the other way, into Boston. In Post Office Square you have Sip Café. Right next to North Station you have the world-class Equal Exchange Café. It’s a particularly egregious sin to leave out EECafé.

J'accuse! and other such condemnations. Waggy finger of disapproval and all that.

• Set up a nice home office.
• Go on a vacation.
• Buy a large solid-state drive for the work MacBook Pro.
• Buy a docking station for the MacBook Pro.
• Take my special ladyfriend to O Ya for omakase.
• Buy the necessary USB hub so that I can power two external monitors and the laptop’s own monitor at work.

I don’t mean to be flip, but The Sea reminded me of Ray from Achewood:

Poetry IS boring and difficult. Take a look at this line by Tennyson, in his rimjob of a poem “Tintern Abbey”:

FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.–Once again

Sounds to me like someone was gettin’ paid by the word. That’s a pretty long way of saying that you’re standing by a creek. Here is how that could be written instead:

DOGG check it I am by this creek;
and I got hell of emotions…in my brain

Basically we all get annoyed when someone uses the old-fashioned Tennyson-type style because you know the writer is just copying the greats and probably wears a gaelic thumb ring. Modern poets can’t do that “thee, thou, wrest’d from sweet April’s bosom” kind of crap ‘cause modern people don’t talk that way.

In The Sea’s case, it can be reduced as follows: “My wife died a while ago, and I am sad, and now I think about my memories.”

The Sea is the sort of paint-by-numbers exercise that you’d get if you wrote your book with a particularly boring, sensitive Times of London reviewer in mind. (Not The Guardian. I would never try to write for The Guardian, knowing that their Digested Reads series is out there, waiting.) I envision that John Banville decided he wanted a book which would be called “elegiac” and “autumnal” and would win the Booker Prize. So he wrote that book, and the reviewers called it elegiac and autumnal, and it won the Booker. Yay on him.

It is a very gray book. Our narrator is renting a room from one of your classic spinster landladies, hair all bunned up and meals all eaten from a tin. What is the story with this landlady? We certainly get that she’s spinsteresque. Anyway, our narrator is a widower. His late wife spends nearly of the book dying, and little else. It sure would be nice to learn something about the late wife, other than that she died. Anyway, so his mind wanders freely over his youth spent at the shore. He kissed a girl there. She almost took her clothes off for him once. Then she died. The clothes-removing girl is capriciously violent and kind of gross; I envision an unkempt tomboy. She and her parents are staying in their highfalutin place at the shore, which is where our narrator meets her.

The shore itself is gray. The girl’s parents are essentially nonentities. Or maybe single-entities: the mother is fat, but apparently not obscenely so; the father has a big belly and laughs a lot.

And … that’s about it. Our narrator lives in his little room, thinks about his past, and mourns the loss of his wife. What’s amazing about this mourning is that it never really sheds any light on his late wife; he’s talking about other people, but he’s really talking about himself. Perhaps this is The Point, but this is not a Point in whose company I care to spend 200 pages.

If The Sea is supposed to be read for any particular reason, I guess it must be for the language. Banville spends lots of time choosing words. The book is about the words more than it’s about what they say. Our narrator is a self-described dilettante who writes about art history, so the words often compare things to paintings. Grey things, that is; it compares grey things to paintings. Grey, grey, grey. For 200 pages.

This is a self-consciously belletristic book. It is also self-consciously trying to remind us of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Its self-conscious parroting only serves to remind you of the unbridgeable distance between Speak, Memory and The Sea.

• I’m half-convinced that the notion of a “bar” is like a “nation” or a “corporation”: a conceptual fiction masking lots of variety underneath. The real atom of a bar is the bartender. This rather shocking discovery came to me after visiting Clio with a friend, and encountering a bartender who was not-Todd. Todd is amazing. All Clio bartenders who are not-Todd are now suspect.

• I get the feeling that Drink is, in the above regard, sui generis. Every bartender at Drink makes spectacular cocktails. I have ordered many a cocktail from Drink, from many a bartender; all have been amazing. I like having the confidence to order from any of their bartenders and know that I’ll enjoy what I get. Though try to get Scott. Scott is awesome.

• I should note, by the way, that if you’re reading this blog, if you’ve not met me, and if you’re in the Boston area, we should grab a cocktail at Drink.

• I ordered a rye flip from the not-Todd bartender at Clio. It was pretty poor; she confessed that it had been a long time since she’d made one. I had never had one before, but I could only assume that rye flips had to be better than that. It tasted like a thickened and diluted glass of whiskey. When I ordered the same drink from Drink last night, they made it with rye, a raw egg, and a blend of spices that they concocted on their own; it tasted like a very eggy — in a delicious way — glass of eggnog. This seems more in keeping with how J. Random Website describes a rye flip.

• My friend Scott tells me to try this experiment:

  Try making a familiar drink, such as standard margarita — 2:1:1 of tequila, cointreau, lime juice. Now make another one with an egg white in it (shake very vigorously). Taste them side by side to see the effect.

• Speaking of shaking drinks vigorously, that seems important to the egg-based drinks. Without a vigorous shaking, the alcohol and the egg separate. Some bar around here made me a pisco sour that was insufficiently shaken; I got a cocktail that was half egg, half pisco, never the twain meeting.

• Eastern Standard Kitchen also never harmed anyone. Though I’ve not plumbed their depths nearly as much as I should have.

• Rendezvous in Central Square was earth-shatteringly good one night when illustrious SteveReads contributor mrz and I went there together. The drinks were spectacular but the food only so-so, so the next time we went back we decided to sit at the bar and only consume their drinks. The bartender was supercilious and not all that great at his job. Plus they were missing the cigar bitters this time around. I was disappointed. If I’m going to spend $10 on a drink, it practically ought to contain precious metals, and they ought to deliver it with a striptease. Or at least a smile.

  I think the moral from that second trip to Rendezvous is a restatement of the first bullet: get to know your bartender.

The job where I’ve been working since September 1 has kept me very, very busy, in a good, exhilarating kind of way. I find that I have less wattage available for reading. In days past, I could read a dry, disagreeable book, and really take to the pleasure of a future evisceration. My pen would go flying across the page, taking notes here, crossing out entire paragraphs there, sometimes telling the author to perform anatomically impossible acts on themselves.

Perhaps in time I will return there, but I have apparently lost the patience. It’s not that I’m looking for an echo chamber from my books; it’s that I think I’ve temporarily lost the ability to believe that “these are arguments which we must confront.” If I think they’re silly arguments, they’re cutting even more into precious, limited mental space.

All of this is by way of background to explain why Richard Epstein’s book Mortal Peril?: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? sits forlornly back at home on my bed, while I ride the train up to visit my lovely girlfriend in New Hampshire. Mortal Peril? is based on libertarian axioms explaining why health care is not an inalienable right, and how it ought to be market-allocated like anything else. If this means that only the wealthy get health care, because only they can afford it, then so be it.

Perhaps this is unfair to Epstein, and is based on my not having given the book enough of a shot to have gotten far into it. In that case I blame Epstein. Whom is he trying to convince with his book? If it’s libertarians, then he has the right idea: begin the book by discoursing on the power of negative rights (freedom to contract without interference, basically). If he’s trying to convince those of us who want to raise the level of the poor, on the other hand, then he’s not speaking our language. His book is one of those dour, dryly theoretical books that declares — sadly, of course, ever so sadly, with condescension to those benighted souls who think government can help people — the futility of trying to help anyone out. This is an Axiom. Another of his Axioms is that voluntary exchange between two people is always win-win. Either there’s a lot hidden under the word “voluntary,” or I suspect drug addicts would have something to say about that. Yet if you take it as an Axiom that all exchange is win-win, it follows that even addicts benefit from the transaction; thus follows the idea of “rational addiction.” This would sound insane if it came from anyone but an economist.

Epstein has his axioms and I have mine. My first axiom would declare that the futility of a government program is an empirical question, not to be settled by theoretical arguments about negative or positive rights. My book Mortal Peril (I would drop Epstein’s question mark) would try to answer the following question: if positive rights, ensured at government gunpoint, are such a bad thing, then why has almost every advanced industrial economy instituted guaranteed health care as a right of citizenship? I would look at the relation — if there is one — between economic inequality and economic growth.

One thing I wouldn’t do is wave my hands at the economic scarcity problem — infinite wants, they tell us, and finite resources — and declare that this proves the impossibility of health care for all. I would look, for instance, at the actual cost of preventing cholera in a developing nation, or the cost of providing free lunch to every American schoolchild, or the costs and benefits of getting iodized salt into the bodies of children who would otherwise develop goiter. We’re not talking about getting a BMW into the garage of every poverty-stricken African (or giving every African a garage, for that matter).

Yet that’s exactly the sort of misrepresentation that Epstein’s book — the fraction of it I could get through, anyway — traffics in. If it descended for a moment to an empirical look at health care or aid to the poor, the whole charade would come tumbling down. Sometimes government hurts the poor; I think here of some housing projects. But not all housing projects! There are several perfectly clean, safe housing projects in Cambridge, and so far as I know they’re no more dangerous than the rest of the city. Surely there are successful housing projects all over the United States. Just as surely there are some dangerous ones that are drug havens. What makes Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia lush and loved, whereas Franklin Park in Washington D.C. is weedy, filled with the homeless at all times of day, and a place you wouldn’t want to be caught after dark? These are questions for Jane Jacobs, not for Richard Epstein. Jacobs is doggedly empirical; Epstein is unfortunately theoretical.

If, like Epstein, I insisted on the use of private charity rather than government coercion to provide health care to the poor, I’d examine the efficiency of both alternatives. I wouldn’t, as Epstein does, wave my arms feverishly about the waste of government expense. I would collect data on these things. Government wastes money, surely, but how much it wastes is an empirical question. Do the scale economies of government programs let it waste less than competing private organizations? Insurance companies count every paid claim as a loss, and spend a lot of money trying to attract only the healthiest beneficiaries; do we count their administrative overhead as “waste”? If not, why not? Shouldn’t we count an expense as “waste” if it doesn’t go toward providing health care for a beneficiary? Let’s compare insurance companies and government agencies by the same standard, not by a standard calculated to make government lose.

Probably the level of government waste varies depending upon which program we’re talking about. Why is it always social programs which conservatives insist are so wasteful? Why not, say, the Department of Defense? I would like conservatives to be self-consistent and insist on cutting waste wherever they find it. Libertarians believe that self-defense is one of the few justifiable government expenditures, but do they really believe that the massive military-industrial complex we’ve built is entirely necessary?

There was a period in American history, Epstein notes, when thousands of charity hospitals filled the United States. Those seem to have largely disappeared, or at least been overtaken by for-profit hospitals that are required to admit all comers to their emergency rooms. Why is that? Is it that the government has crowded out private investment? Or is there some other explanation?

Being empirically minded allows you to keep from going entirely off the rails. Take a step, then look around and see if you’re off in the weeds; if you are, step back and try a different path. Epstein’s theoretical orientation — and the theoretical orientation of many libertarians — makes them follow a path until they drive off a cliff.

Yet we, as Americans, are expected to take libertarian ideas seriously, because this country’s deepest ideologies speak to the perfection of free markets. (Free markets are perfect. They also don’t exist.) So we’re expected to kowtow in the direction of the Epsteins and the Hayeks, rather than toward the Elsters or the Noves. Daniel Davies notes the timorousness of the American Left in this regard:

They’re [the Chicago school and friends are] always hacks, Brad. Always. Yes even Milton Friedman. The more independent-minded ones will occasionally come up with a liberalish or fair-minded idea or two, but this is purely for display, not for ever doing anything about if to do so would run the risk of a higher rate of capital gains tax. The ideological core of Chicago-style libertarianism has two planks.

1. Vote Republican.
2. That’s it.

Why are American liberals so damnably obsessed with extending intellectual charity to right wing hacks which is never reciprocated? It reaches parodic form in the case of those tiresome “centrists” who left wing American bloggers are always playing the Lucy-holds-the-football game with. Oh, but their politics are sooo centrist! They’re practically 50% of the way between Republicans and Democrats! Yeah, specifically they’re right-wing Democrats in non-election years and party line Republicans any time it might conceivably matter (note that here, two years after the White House ceremony at which Friedman apparently “spent most of his 90th birthday lunch telling Bush that his fiscal policy was a disaster”, here he is signing a letter in support of more of the same).

I wouldn’t mind, but it’s clearly not intellectual honesty that makes American liberals act pretend that Milton Friedman wasn’t a party line Republican hack (which he was; he was also an excellent economist, which is why he won the Nobel Prize for Economics, not the Nobel Prize for Making A Sincere and Productive Contribution To The National Political Debate, which he would not have won if there was one). If it was just pure scholarly decency that made Yank liberals so keen on recognising the good qualities even in their political opponents, then you’d expect that they would also be quick to recognise the good qualities, analytical insights and so on in prominent Communist intellectuals. And do they? Do they fuck. I won’t link to the Paul Sweezy obituary, because I think everyone involved agrees that this wasn’t Brad’s finest hour, but it certainly wasn’t atypical.

Of course the explanation’s quite sensible. American liberals kiss up to Friedmanites and kick down on Reds because they’re still, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, scared of being red-baited. One of the enduring reasons why I regard JK Galbraith as a hero is that practically alone among mainstream commentators of the era, he by and large refused to play this game.

A great Boston restaurant reviewer who goes by the handle “MC Slim JB” links (via Twitter) to a Columbia Journalism Review history of food reviewing. The review is essentially divided into three themes:

• how food reviewing tracked the expanding universe of ethnic foods available in New York City
• reviewers’ perspectives on anonymity — specifically, whether they felt obliged to remain anonymous to prevent favorable treatment by the chef
• the questionable ethical guidelines followed by today’s amateur food reviewers.

The first bullet is interesting. The second is as well, and for the record I think reviewers should always be anonymous; there’s no question in my mind on this point.

To the extent that Internet reviewers make a name for themselves and drop anonymity to get special dishes at restaurants, that’s obviously bad. The CJR piece focuses on a few amateur reviewers who prostitute themselves in this way. For what it’s worth, I’ve never heard of any of these reviewers.

What the CJR piece doesn’t bother to examine is what happens when everyone is a reviewer. When chefs only need to be on the lookout for Ruth Reichl, they can post her photo up in the kitchen and keep an eye out. But when every one of us could go on Chowhound and tear a restaurant to shreds, presumably the culinary standard always has to stay high.

Of course there are caveats here. First is that, when everyone can talk, everyone’s voice is correspondingly diminished: why should someone listen to me when there are thousands — millions? — of other people on the Internet just like me? But that just changes the point a little: chefs now have to make nice not only with the Reichls of the world, but with the entire Internet.

The Internet speaks with many voices, of course. What you’ll find on Chowhound is that one man’s pigsty is another man’s foodie bliss. Sometimes this reflects the quirks of the particular day the reviewer went. Other times it means that the reviewer has no taste. You have to judge on your own. Certain Internet reviewers get rated highly by their peers; MC Slim JB gets that honor on Chowhound. Does that rating mean anything? Maybe their peers are all dolts; this is certainly how I feel about highly-rated Slashdot posts (whose quality, from my once-yearly checks, has declined from even its already piss-poor station).

So you just have to decide how you like the reviewer and how you like the venue where he posts. I find that if a number of Chowhound reviewers have good things to say about a restaurant, if their tastes match up with mine, and if the reviewers sound intelligent, then I should probably check out the restaurant. Over time, who knows whether this will remain true: maybe the world at large will discover Chowhound, will fill it with “EAT THE FRIED SHRIMP AT TGI FRIDAYS IT IS TO DIE FOR LOL”-type reviews, and will therefore kill its allure. As more idiots fill up the forums, they’ll tend to promote reviews that they themselves like. And so on down the drain we’ll go. All I’m really entitled to say is that as of this moment, Chowhound is my place to go for good restaurant reviews.

The world is more complicated now. I think it’s unquestionably better. Previously, you had two or three professional voices to rely upon, and the voices of your friends; if your tastes weren’t in line with the reviewers, tough luck. Now you can find people who share your tastes and follow their recommendations. It’s a happy world.

I’ve thought of this in other contexts, too. Lots of people venerate the wine reviewer Robert Parker, the man with the million-dollar nose. He certainly knows more about wine than I ever will, and he may even be better equipped, biologically speaking, to do that job than I am. Precisely because he’s such a different a wine consumer than I am, why should I necessarily base my wine-purchasing decisions off what he says? Is it at all clear that I’ll enjoy a complicated wine as much as Parker does? I certainly don’t agree with Dave Barry’s joke, probably 20 years old at this point, that no one can tell the difference between wine and melted popsicles. At the same time, I can’t detect many of the flavors that Parker can. What he considers a superb bottle of wine may turn out to be a waste of money for me.

Another way to view Parker’s job is as a teacher. Here I think the possibilities are more hopeful. I may not be able to taste, as Parker did during his road-to-Damascus moment, the “main components of a Riesling.” (Or maybe I can. Not sure.) But if Parker tells me that a wine contains such-and-such flavors, I can start looking for things that I wouldn’t have thought to look for before. Drinking a wine with Parker by your side may be akin to staring at an abstract painting in a museum with an art historian by your side. It looks like a jumble until someone puts together the pieces for you.

When reading Parker on wine, or Anthony Lane on film, or Michiko Kakutani on books, the question I think we’ve always asked is whether the reviewer is similar to us. If Lane says he dislikes a film for some particular reason, we have to decide whether that reason is something we care about. If it’s not, we should find another reviewer who focuses on other things. One reviewer may not like Avatar because he thinks the story is silly; another may love it for the visuals. If you’re into visuals, maybe you should listen to the second reviewer.

None of this is rocket science, of course. But it’s worth thinking a bit about why and how we read reviewers in the first place, before we decide that the Internet is the death of professionalism.

It was a long, stressful (but exhilarating) month at HubSpot, and everything wrapped up last week. So I was looking forward to this weekend to recharge my batteries a bit.

It didn’t quite work out that way. First of all, my body took the end of the one-month development cycle, with its stress and sleeplessness and lack of exercise and not-entirely-awesome diet, as an excuse to finally collapse. The cold started on Thursday, built a head of steam on Friday, and really pummeled me on Saturday.

I couldn’t do what I wanted on Saturday, because I had to help my lovely girlfriend move her stuff from one place to another — including beds, dressers, etc. We moved all that stuff out of the old place yesterday, and moved it all in to the new place today. Normally I’d have plenty of energy for that sort of thing, but the cold took it all out of me after a few hours of work.

I took the 1:30 train back to Cambridge and planned my relaxation. Central to it was a hot toddy. Also a bed. Other than those two things, most was negotiable.

A few hours later, and here I am: pajamas on, in bed, toddy balanced on my sternum, cats both within reach, and nothing I’ll need for the next 15 hours anywhere outside a three-foot radius. The toddy has already worked its warming magic. Life … is good.

There’s a very odd exchange between a former Microsoft VP and the official Microsoft blog. What’s odd is that Microsoft essentially tells the former VP that he’s right: when Microsoft says that “what matters is innovation at scale, not just innovation at speed,” what that says to me is “We take innovations that others have come up with, once we know that the market is established, and make that market bigger.”

In fact this is how I’ve heard Microsoft’s business model described. And there’s nothing wrong with Microsoft’s approach, actually. Little companies innovate; big companies scale up innovation. So that’s fine.

It’s just weird, though, that Microsoft even bothered to respond, if essentially their entire point was to affirm the truth of the op-ed. I’m 100% with Jon Gruber on this:

Why in the world did they respond to this? And even worse, without refuting any of his claims, most especially his core premise that Microsoft is divided into dozens of bureaucratic fiefdoms that fight against each other to protect their turf?

P.S.: Microsoft really didn’t need to include a fucking smiley face in the middle of their blog post.

…I’m really enjoying jQuery. I’ve never really written JavaScript before, so I very much enjoyed writing this little thing.

This is the first time in my career that I’ve used JavaScript extensively, so I’m trying to learn some best practices. A few people have recommended Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts, so I picked it up. While skimming through it looking for something else, I ran into his description (on page 44) of using memoization (essentially, caching) to speed up the computation of certain functions.

The example people always use here — and Crockford is no exception — is the Fibonacci sequence. The shortest way to implement it is recursively. As Crockford points out, the recursive solution doesn’t scale: the number of recursive calls necessary to compute the nth Fibonacci number is proportional to the nth power of the golden ratio. (From what I can see, the constant of proportionality converges very rapidly to about 1.11803. That number must have some special name.) I’ve coded both versions up in Python; the recursive version keeps track of how many function calls it had to make.

So then Crockford’s solution, and the solution written in lots of places (Higher-Order Perl, for instance) is to use memoization: cache the results of fib(n) for smaller n, then use the cached results rather than computing those values anew when you need them later on.

This isn’t really a solution, though, as my friend Seth pointed out to me some months ago. It’s certainly clever, and languages like Perl or JavaScript make it very easy. In Perl, you can automatically memoize any of your functions with the Memoize module: just do

use Memoize;
memoize('fib');

and voilà: all of your calls to fib() will be memoized from then on. Pretty cool, really. Manipulating the symbol table is kind of neat.

But this has only temporarily disguised the problem. Let’s look at the time and space requirements for all three of our fib(n) implementations:

Recursive, non-memoized: exponentially many function calls, hence exponentially many stack frames, hence exponential memory usage. Linear running time.

Recursive, memoized: linear memory usage (one cache entry for every i, for i less than or equal to n). Linear running time.

Iterative, non-memoized: constant memory usage (must keep the nth, (n-1)st, and (n-2)th values of the sequence in memory at all times, but that’s it), linear running time.

By using some language cleverness, you’ve made the problem harder than you need to: memoization increases your memory usage from constant to linear, and does nothing to your running time. By thinking harder about the problem, you can improve both performance aspects and not need any clever language business.

Seth has told me for quite a long time that recursion and higher-order programming (closures and so forth) are interesting but make debugging a lot harder. His contention would probably be that you can often replace a clever recursive solution with a non-clever, easier-to-debug, better-performing one.

That said, at least some higher-order-programming tools make my life easier. In Python, I love list comprehensions:

print [x**2 for x in xrange(1,11) if (x**2 % 2 == 0)]

or the older-school but perhaps more familiar map() and filter():

print filter(lambda x : x % 2 == 0, map(lambda x : x**2, xrange(1,11)))

(because I favor readability over concision, in practice I would expand this into several lines: a map() line, and a filter() line, and so forth)

As I’ve mentioned, I lament the absence of first-class functions in Java. Then again, I’ve seen enough people shoot themselves (and me) in the foot with unreadable Perl or Python, using all the cleverness that the languages provide to them, that I think I’d be okay with a less expressive language that forces programmers to be really boring.

I think owing to busyness at work, limited sleep, lack of exercise and similar things, I’ve been way behind on writing book reviews. Rather than wait until I have the time to handle each of them properly, I’m going to summarize as many as I can right here.

• Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (With thanks to Henry Farrell for recommending this.) The new economy — everyone blessed with thousands of (as it turns out, worthless) stock options, everyone making money off senseless business ventures, everyone a “web designer” — is over, and we’re back to the old economy. Henwood argues convincingly that the new economy was only really lucrative for the small handful of people on top, and that most of us just continued to get screwed: the American economy got a lot better for the rich and not all that much better for the rest of us. This all avoids being a tirade, because the author combines the prose of the pamphleteer with most of the erudition of a scholar. (“Most of” here is a compliment: most people don’t read scholars, and people should read Henwood.)

• Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It

  I’d say there are three parts to this book, woven all around one another: first, and most sizably, lots of Ken Auletta being a Google fanboy (see his onstage interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt if you want to see a man keeping just on the respectable side of fawning); second, a rather powerful chunk reminding us of just how completely the Internet has changed the world; and third, some nonsense, of the sort that drives engineers nuts, about how Google’s focus on rationalizing markets means that they may fundamentally lack wisdom.

  The fanboy part I’ll ignore; I should have expected, in any book about popular technologists, that it would coo over its subject. When Auletta steps back and describes just what the Internet has wrought in only about a decade and a half, on the other hand, it’s astonishing. Craigslist killed newspaper classified ads and thereby a large chunk of newspapers’ revenue. Google is in the process of overthrowing traditional advertising. YouTube is how many of us consume television shows now, and Netflix is how we consume movies. Amazon changes how we buy books. iTunes (Napster, really) turned music digital. Google is moving into the cell-phone industry. Their acquisition of YouTube looked at the time like they were purchasing a known massive copyright-infringement platform with the intent of directly challenging intellectual-property law. And on and on. It’s breathtaking.

  Now, part of what makes Google Google in all of this — part of what all of us love watching — is the rationality driving it all. We perceive — and Auletta confirms — that Google approaches any new market, asks “What should this market look like?” and immediately moves to drive out irrationalities. Advertising could be done better, so Google is doing it better. Cell-phone software sucks and doesn’t reflect the computer revolution of the 1980s; Google is building Android to fix that. They see a problem and have the resources to fix it, so they fix it.

  If you’re from one side of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures,” and you’re a writer who needs to provoke controversy in a book about Google, you will wag the disciplinary finger at Google here and bemoan their “cold, logical rationality.” It’s a staple of the genre, and I can’t really fault Auletta for it: in writing a book about a tech company, you’re either going to fall into fanboydom or into These Guys Really Should Have Got A Degree In Anthropology So That They Could Understand How Humans Really Are territory; Auletta does both, and does both rather mildly, so I have little to complain about. But in any case, he has to get in his digs: Google’s founders are confused when EPIC objects to algorithmic monitoring of Gmail, according to Auletta because the founders view the world through hyper-rational blinders. This part of the book isn’t really believable, probably because I’m a geek. Humankind has not created very many men who both are prose stylists and who can talk to geeks in their language.

  (Little sidebar from an earlier part of my life. I used to work for a startup that was all about openness when it could afford to be: that is, when the venture-capital funding hadn’t yet dried up. Every month, they’d show the company’s engineers the raw numbers and the bottom line. Then there came a point when maybe they didn’t want to share quite as many numbers with us. When pressed by the engineers in the room, this company’s founder explained, not convincingly, that we geeks would just take those numbers, overreact to them, and get scared. So this was for our own good, you see.

  Turned out that the numbers were really just bad in an objective sense. By the time the company was acquired — because it had a lot of intellectual property, a lot of smart developers, and a world-famous founder — the acquirer bought it by just paying off its substantial debts.

  I’ve taken some lessons from this: 1) that when openness disappears, it’s time to polish off your résumé; 2) that transparency is something that companies keep so long as it’s convenient; and 3) that geeks really do have a great built-in bullshit meter, which entirely derives from that cold, rational, objective viewpoint that Auletta scorns.)

• E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime

  The only novel I’ve ever encountered that has a detectable meter. On quite a few pages I read it while snapping my fingers. Check out Ta-Nehisi Coates’s excerpt to see what I mean.

  The story centers on one New York family and the intense, exploding world that surrounded them: Harry Houdini escaping from damn near everything; Emma Goldman (whose Living My Life awaits me on my bookshelf) singing the virtues of anarchy and inviting policemen’s truncheons; obsessive men falling prey to the charms of glamorous film actresses; murders happening on the roof of the original Madison Square Garden; and black men resisting abuse and getting torn to shreds as punishment. In its literary skill at combining many historical personages into one fluid story, it’s like Forrest Gump for smart people. This is an exciting, captivating, rhythmic book. My only suggestion would be that you read it in one sitting: the excitement is hypnotic, but only if you’ve let yourself settle into the trance that Doctorow has built for you.

  (Ragtime confirms a pattern I only started to notice when I got into Philip Roth: books by men very often feature completely unexplainable sex by their male protagonists with beautiful women. The men are often awkward nebbishes, yet they end up with curvy, sexually unslakable women. It never makes any sense, but hey: if I get into the position to write a novel, I’ll probably put my fantasies down on paper too. “Maria Romero’s raven-black locks fell around her as she collapsed breathless on the silk-covered pillow. She’d spent the previous six hours engaged in her favorite activity: ecstatic sexual congress combined with a lecture on Löwenheim-Skolem.” Get ready for it, because nerd porn is coming.)

• Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

  There’s a lot to recommend this book, and lot to recommend avoiding it. On the plus side, the authors really are on the right of the battle to make companies enjoyable for their workers. Give all your employees windows, they say; it’s nonsense to claim that this is impossible, and hotel rooms — every last one of which has a window — supply the existence proof. And more: don’t push your employees to push crap out the door; let them know that you respect quality, and they will rise to the challenge. And still more: your teams need to “gel” (DeMarco and Lister may spell it “jell,” but I refuse). To make them gel, they need managers, but they don’t need managers to sit watching their every move. Your employees want to create great work; people want to enjoy coming to work every day, and they want to produce something that they’re proud of. Make that kind of job available to them, and the quality product will flow out of them naturally. Hence the quasi-paradoxical line: Quality is free, but you have to pay for it. Peopleware is loaded with good bits like this.

  At the same time, it suffers from some annoyances. The authors seem out to sell their own consultancy, so much of the book feels like hucksterism. Just adopt practices A, B, and C, and you’ll end up with a great company. There’s certainly a selection bias: those companies that enlist DeMarco and Lister’s consulting services probably differ systematically from those that don’t — either in the negative sense that more’s broken at D&L’s clients, or in the positive sense that those clients are the more adaptable ones. D&L insist that they’ve distilled decades of experience into this book, which just makes me crave more evidence that they’ve fomented real, positive change for their clients. Then there’s the inevitable question: if you guys are so good, why haven’t you started a software company?

  So expect about half this book to make you pound the desk with enthusiasm. Expect the other half to make you roll your eyes.

• Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

  Everyone in software knows this book by now. It’s most famous for Brooks’s Law: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Brooks presided over a number of massive projects at IBM in the 60s and 70s. He writes from a whole different world: the technical specs for a new operating system would fill 10 or more feet of bookshelf space; contrary to my expectations, Brooks actually seems happy about that. You just have to get the right documentation guy to write clear docs.

  In some ways, Brooks’s writing sounds really antiquated; it’s written for people putting together massive software projects that take years to complete. All the rage nowadays is “agile”: get something out the door within a few weeks or months, then improve it bit by bit over time. In part this is to control customer expectations: put something concrete and limited before your users; now they have a specific reference point against which they can specify their needs, rather than building a dream world in their minds that you’ll never be able to meet. Brooks’s Law certainly applies as much in this new world as it did in the old. As do Brooks’s other maxims: software still needs a designer to impose architectural harmony on the whole.

  I found his “No Silver Bullet” idea the most compelling of all: that no improvement in software technology or process would improve programmer productivity by 10x over the next decade. Brooks held out some hope for object-oriented programming, but I think his hopes — feeble as they were — have been dashed. The promise and the peril in organizations comes from, and has always come from, the people in those organizations. No amount of technology is going to solve that problem. Brooks summarizes one part of this as Conway’s Law: “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communications structures of these organizations.” That’s still the truest thing I’ve ever read on software-organization design.

  For how much it’s discussed, I’m amazed that I still got so much out of Brooks. The Mythical Man-Month remains a must-own.

• Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

  This is another book that has to be read in few sittings, I think. It’s really an unending series of heartbreaks and frozen daggers to the gut (metaphorically speaking) for the poor narrator. Having read it over many sittings and scattered sessions on the elliptical at the gym, I lost a lot of its rhythm and its beauty. The narrator is a professor at some New York university (possibly NYU, possibly Columbia — I don’t know that the book ever says), his best friend is a mixed-media artist, his best friend’s first wife is a strange, cold woman, and he’s surrounded by a cast of literal misfits. People die suddenly, others get involved in drugs, and the world just keeps dragging him along. His voice has an exhaustion to it, which Hustvedt conveys skillfully: he’s at the end of his life, looking back on one disaster after another.

  Obviously I can’t really suggest such a book for what it will do to your spirits, but it’s an engaging read.

• Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate

  Fascinating from start to finish. You can think of many reasons offhand why such a book would be endlessly captivating, but Gambetta will continually surprise you with the twists and turns in his subject.

  Start with the obvious question: you’re a criminal, and you want to communicate with your fellow-bad guys. How do you do it? That’s intriguing on its own. If you know the other bad guy, you can vouch for him (or think you can — see “Brasco, Donnie”). If you don’t know him, you need to much more carefully apply the vetting that we use in the legit world: find someone you know who knows him, ask around about him, and so forth.

  Obviously your big concern as an underworld fellow is the police. They’re constantly trying to listen in on your communications, get fellow bad guys to turn state’s evidence, and plant undercover cops in your midst.

  When your organization reaches a certain level of success and infamy — think of the Mafia here — you now have a brand to protect. Rival organizations start claiming your name to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts. To avoid brand dilution, you need to make sure that only those people who are actually in the Mafia say they’re in the Mafia. Trademark law isn’t going to protect you here, so you need to enforce your own brand.

  And how do your establish your bona fides as a bad guy? One intensely fascinating thread in Codes to the Underworld has to do with commitment strategies: imposing some heavy cost on yourself — some cost that absolutely no one outside the Mafia (or whichever group) would ever think of fakin. Henry Farrell, over at Crooked Timber, excerpts one amazing bit on this score:

  Erefaan’s face is covered in tattoos. “Spit on my grave” is tattooed across his forehead; “I hate you, Mum” etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.

  Gambetta has spent decades studying the Italian mafia. He’s a brilliant economic naturalist, with story upon story from the world out there. He’s a gripping writer, to boot. Codes of the Underworld is one of the few works of economics that you’ll be unable to put down. This may be because it’s not recognizable, at first glance, as a work of economics. But its economic cred is pristine; it’s filled with references to the great Thomas Schelling. Highly recommended, both for those who love economics and those who love The Godfather.

  (I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention, by the way, Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior. It’s an boundlessly interesting piece of work.)

This election has me more miserable than I really want to go into, so let me just say this:

Yes, Brown’s election means that a lot of filibusters down the line are possible. But what people are really flailing all around about now is that health reform, in particular, might be filibustered to death.

Now then. If that’s what people are actually concerned about (let me be really fucking clear that that’s what I’m concerned about), then we could have dodged the bullet on this long ago. Obama and Senate Democrats tried to play nice with Republicans for a long while. That failed. It led to months of delay. If we’re essentially into conference-committee territory now, we could have been in conference-committee territory months ago. By the time Scott Brown’s miserable ass got sworn into Congress, we could have long since had health reform that people aren’t embarrassed about.

Lots of people, myself included, have railed against Senate procedure causing everything to get slowed down. But the fact is that health reform was and is an unforced error. The threat of a filibuster cannot explain why Democrats took so long to get the job done.

It speaks to our failings as a society that Harry Reid could be pushed to resign for saying some words about Barack Obama, whereas the entire Republican party feels no compulsion to resign for, objectively speaking, consigning many thousands of uninsured poor people to die every year and resisting all attempts to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

It speaks to the Democratic Party’s failings that they don’t say this.