Book Review: White Noise

Don DeLillo is one of those authors whose name I kept seeing but didn't know much about.  But I'd seen my favorite author, David Foster Wallace, compared to him so I was intrigued.  From reading the book jacket of White Noise (I found the version that was the 1985 entry on the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) it was clear that Foster Wallace must have been influenced by this book.

The book is about a professor of "Hitler studies" at a small college.  Not much happens in the book, except in a few powerful bursts.  The main one is the "Airborne Toxic Event" which consists of a black cloud of highly toxic gas released after a railroad car accident.  The end of the book has a somewhat gruesome scene too that I won't spoil.  The book it very funny, very biting, sometimes scary, sometimes sad.  I enjoyed it immensely and it makes me wish I knew how to write like this.  How does one fill 310 pages with, for the most part, small nonevents (a trip to the grocery store, say) and nothing but internal monologue and conversations.  Moreover, how does one do that in a way that is gripping and keeps the reader interested?  Where do you learn to write a novel that says something about life as it's lived today without anything much happening to otherwise uninteresting people?  I don't know but DeLillo does.  And for a book written in 1985 its seems very prescient to me.  His observations about modern culture may have seemed exaggerated then but have only become truer since.  But the best way to convince someone to read the book (or not to) is with the following passage which I loved.  If it speaks to you then so will the book, I think.  It occurs as the protagonist professor is getting attended to at a shelter during the Airborne Toxic Event:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Bursts

The nonfiction book world owes Malcolm Gladwell a beer. Or maybe a car. Or even a house. You see, as far as I can tell, Gladwell was the first one to make science-y concepts accessible by telling you a story about someone or something. He won't just explain, say, some new strategy for cancer research, he'll tell you about Bob the cancer patient and Joe the cancer doctor and how no one understood what was wrong with Bob until one day he met Joe and ....

Bursts tries to make the research of author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi accessible. And Barabasi really gives us a cast of characters: the globe-trotting artist who keeps getting harrassed by Homeland Security; a guy who corresponds with Einstein about the fifth dimension; a dude with an fake ear surgically implanted on his arm (really); and best of all, half the book tells the story of the Hungarian version of Braveheart.

These stories are generally great and very intersting. The story of the Hungarian Braveheart is worth buying and reading the book alone in my opinion. The chapters of the book actually alternative between the main narrative and the historical tale of a minor nobleman who starts a rebellion of the peasants in late Medieval/early Renaissance Hungary (for Freedom!). So you could just read the history and skip the rest. In fact, I'd almost recommend it because the rest of the book is a bit of muddle.

The book is called "Bursts" and it turns out that scientists, including Barabasi, have discovered a bursty pattern in nature, including human nature. For example, animals don't search for food using a truly random pattern. If they did, you see the same animal is all kinds of different places on any given day. Instead, animals stay in a particular area for a while, hunting someplace while the hunting is good. Once the hunting turns bad, then there's a 'burst' where they jump to a new hunting ground. Similarly, humans tend do to things like respond to emails in bursts during the day. We don't respond as every email comes in, but we prioritize. Some emails will get an immediate response. Some will wait hours, some days, some even weeks (or longer for me).

Great. So we burst. Animals burst. So what? Well, Barabasi is also trying to tell us that we're very predictable. If he knows your daily pattern he can tell you where you're likely to be on any given day at any given time. For a huge percentage of us 80% of our time is spent at home or at work. And we're very regular about it. We might show up in Australia once in a while, but that, too, happens in bursts. We don't wake up on random mornings and say "hey, why don't play hooky from work and fly to Paris instead!" (or if we do, we don't actually follow through).

Barabasi thinks that someday we'll find out that our future is totally predictable because he can predict (using our cellphone location records) where we spend most of our day. Or at least, the future might be predictable. Or it might not. Hmmm. Did I mention the part about the Hungarian Braveheart? I don't want to give anything away, but if you think Mel Gibson got tortured good at the end of that movie, wait until you find out how they did it in Hungary! Worth the price of admission alone.

Book Reviews: The Age of Turbulence and The Age of the Unthinkable

This is a review of two books by two authors each trying, grandly, to define an "Age." One is an 80 year old who has decades of experience in economics, business, and at the highest levels of government. The other is by younger man without the benefit of so much experience and so many lived-through crisis who is nevertheless attempting a revolutionary manifesto. One book demonstrates wisdom and nuance, and has an underlying current of thought that says that we can never be too sure of things. The other lays out a far-reaching and comprehensive global world-view that leaves no real room for doubt or second guessing.

Of course, it's probably not a surprise that the older man is not the one demonstrating wisdom, but rather the straightjacket of ideological precepts he faithfully served for 40 years. But it is still striking how it seems as though Alan Greenspan has written a book of anti-wisdom. His book is a faithful catalog of ideas that ruled the world for decades and now, still, lies shattered.

Greenspan's book, the Age of Turbulence, came out before the Great Recession. Even his prologue to the paperback edition came out before the worst hit. And so, his book is confident and breezy. This is a nice touch as he describes his life. I can confirm what all the reviews I read said: the first, biographical, half of the book is quite enjoyable. But the second half, his take on the world and his prescriptions for it, is like watching an particularly painful episode of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sure enough, right there on page 230, Greenspan mentions exotic mortgages. His take is that, "the typical American household ended up with a more valuable home and better access to the wealth it represented." Sure we took on more debt and there might be a bubble but hey, we'll all recover nicely. He does have one concern about the boom years though: all that income inequality. But never fear, better education will take care of that.

OK, at some level, this isn't really fair to Greenspan. He's been brutally honest about the failings of his ideology and the concerns he expresses are real and legitimate. From everything I can tell he's a decent guy who tried to serve his country well, and for 18 years at the Fed had no indication that he was doing less than a superb job. But sometimes, the messenger gets shot when the message is bad enough. The Age of "Turbulence" ended with a massive gust of wind shear that damn near took the whole country down. His book reads as if Mikhail Gorbachev had written a testament to the majesty of Communism in 1989.

Joshua Cooper Ramo, who, as a partner in Kissinger & Associates, ought to be kinder to 80-something ex-government types takes it to Alan Greenspan quite often in his book, The Age of the Unthinkable. And rightly so. Ramo, like Malcolm Gladwell, illustrates ideas with vignettes. He tells about the success of Hezbollah (which is quite remarkable considering the Israeli army and intelligence services they are up against); about drug-resistant tuberculosis; about a man who got a fundamental flaw in the internet fixed without revealing the problem (because it would have allowed the hackers to take things down before the patches could be applied). In short, he writes about all kinds of complex and unpredictable systems that take down men like Greenspan and Gorbachev. As he puts its, complex systems can, "demolish poor Alan Greenspan's hope that even 40 years of experience is a reliable guide to the future."

The best example Ramo gives in his book is an experiment done by dropping grains of sand onto a plate, one at a time. Slowly, without any human intervention, the grains of sand will form a pyramid. They form a structure that, for all the world, looks supremely well-managed and stable, even though no outside force is doing the managing or stabilizing (anyone else thinking of the Invisible Hand?). But then, suddenly and without warning, one single grain will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It will send the whole pyramid crashing down. And here's the craziest part: no one can predict which grain of sand will be the one that causes the crash. Over and over scientists have done this experiment and we still cannot predict the future. Even 40 years of experience is not a reliable guide to the future.

Ramo's solution is to fight fire with fire. If Al Qaeda is using decentralized cells, then perhaps the State Department and intelligence community should be radically decentralized. He provides a fascinating example of a Brazilian company that gave so much power to its workers during the 1990 hyperinflation that its owner no longer even knows what all the company does or how many employees it has. Another example is that the South African government's resistance to handing out AIDS drugs led to a grass roots people-power movement that has succeeded remarkably at quelling AIDS, while the government's multimillion dollar tuberculosis program resulted in people stopping medication too early leading to drug resistant forms of the disease.

According to Ramo we need to be resilient not just defensive. The sandpile is coming down sooner or later and we'd better be ready for it. By contrast, Greenspan is trying to describe what keeps the sandpile up so we can continue to build it higher and higher. I don't know about you, but after this last decade I'm afraid I have to side with Ramo. And to highly recommend his book--the first three or four chapters get you there if you're in a hurry. But we all need to start thinking about the sandpile on which we're living.

Book Review: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

First off, I borrowed this book from the library and I have to say that Nicole and I are loving our re-discovery of the library.  Free books!  And it’s perfectly legal!  (Do the publishers know about this?)
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a collection of short stories that has been hailed as a masterwork that will return the short story form from exile.  I’m not so sure.  The first four stories are about men who are, well, losers.  These stories are well-written and satisfying in a thank-goodness-that’s-not-me-but-maybe-there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I kind of way.  And they do “rescue” the short story in that they tend not to leave you wanting more.  15-20 pages of these guys and you pretty much get where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.   The stories are interesting and entertaining, but no one needs more than a vignette of these fellows. 
The first four stories are so similar that my hunch is that most reviewers stopped reading and assumed that the rest of the book followed the pattern, because Tower is hailed as a writer of men’s stories.  But Tower doesn’t just stick to these men.  The middle stories are about kids, including one narrated by, gasp, a girl.  These stories are somehow less satisfying.  For example, divorce is a constant theme in the book, but a divorced man is different from a child of divorce.  The guy is going to be lonely and regretful.  But the kid are dealing with all kinds of stuff about whether Mom and Dad still love them and how to deal with Stepmom or Stepdad.  We get a snapshot of a particular kid at a particular time but it’s not enough to fill in the arc of the kid’s life.  And so, like many an American, I’m left wanting more of the story.  I don’t need a happy ending but I need and ending.
The last couple of stories get gruesome in parts – the title story is about Vikings – and just left me feeling queasy.  All very realistic stuff I suppose, but I feel like this book was enough of that sort of thing for me.  Tower’s a very good writer but I hope he’s got more tricks up his sleeve.

The Future (of the news) is Now

We've been hearing a lot lately about the impending demise of the mainstream news media. Newspapers around the country are failing or in big trouble, including some of the premier names. Ditto for the major (American) newsmagazines and even the network TV news divisions. It is true that businesses--even whole industries-- come and go. But many people fear that the decline of news organizations could leave us without an important check on government corruption, abuse, and oppression.

Most commentators are blaming the Internet for these changes. Craigslist allows anyone to post for free the kind of classified ads they once had to pay a newspaper to print. Google News allows anyone to browse the stories from news sites around the world. And many papers themselves put their content on the web for free. Certainly the Internet has already changed the music industry and seems poised to change television and the movies. Why should newspapers be immune?

But there's one type of news source that no one seems much worried about even though it faces intense pressure from the internet: celebrity news. While the Great Recession has taken a toll on even the venerable People Magazine, this area of news seems vibrant and healthy. It seems that because celebrity news isn't considered "important news" by the traditional media, no one has spent much time wondering what it might have going for it.

First off, millions of people actually find celebrity news to be interesting enough that they're willing to shell out money for it. The fact of the matter is, a lot of people just aren't that willing to pay for news about corruption in City Hall. They may be glad that the newspaper is out there exposing it, but they'd rather not shell out to read about it. Lack of interest isn't created by Craigslist or Google News. More likely it's created by Facebook and Twitter and the bazillion other things that people have to entertain themselves with. Competition for our attention spans has never been spread over a wider spectrum o media: live performances, print, radio, television, movies, gaming platforms, Internet websites, cellphones, cellphone apps, and on and on.

But there are those who are still interested in the news and willing to put down the game controller long enough to read a magazine or newspaper. So far, however, the traditional news media hasn't been very creative in thinking about when and where to reach them. Where do most people buy their celebrity magazines? At the checkout stand. You're standing there in line and you see an intriguing cover. Jumping online to TMZ.com isn't an option in the grocery store line (at least not just yet) and so the magazine has you. The downside to this approach is that People and the like don't have a lot of steady subscribers. But the upside is that they have found a way to position themselves in a time and place that works for them.

Now think about your local newspaper. It probably gets delivered to your door every morning (or it would if you actually subscribed to it). When you wake up in the morning do you want to sit down and read the paper with your coffee like grandpa used to? Or are you checking your Blackberry and looking up what the morning commute is like right now? If you drive to work you cannot safely or efficiently read the newspaper (no, seriously, you cannot read and drive, yes I mean you). Would your boss approve if the first 30 minutes of your day was spent reading the newspaper? Finish your workday, drive home, put the kids to bed and all you want to do it watch some entertaining TV.

The newspaper is obsolete. The general interest news magazine is obsolete. This is not something that will happen in the future--this has already happened. A generation has grown to adulthood without the habit of reading the paper in the morning. No amount of handwringing will change this back. Although it's dangerous to generalize from one's personal experience, the way I interact with the news is drastically different from the way I did when I was in college. I used to subscribe to the paper Wall Street Journal. I now read it only online, along with the New York Times. But I also use Google Reader to subscribe to a number of blogs and news feeds (including a couple of blogs by the Wall Street Journal). On my walk to work each morning I listen to podcasts from NPR and the Economist, but also to recorded speeches from my former law school and elsewhere. Today I was listening to Alan Greenspan speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations about the financial crisis--a speech which I'm not even sure I saw reported anywhere. And perhaps worst of all from the perspective of my local newspaper, lately I've taken to picking up a free copy of the political newspaper Politico. While most of the country can get Politico only online, actual paper is given away free in the DC area. I take it to my desk and peruse it each morning it's printed. But it's short and focused and relevant.

I'm a news junkie and yet my local newspaper, the venerable Washington Post, is not in the mix. I don't have time to read the physical paper; the website is poorly designed and frustrating to use; the blogs I followed for a while were uninteresting; and the podcasts nonexistent as far as I know. If there are great blogs or podcasts why isn't the Post doing a better job of letting me know they're out there? I get a letter every month urging me to buy a subscription to a format I'm unlikely ever to go back to. And I like newspapers, I genuinely miss getting the physical object. I remember from my earliest days seeing my dad at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper and thinking, "this is what grownups do." I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal as a senior in high school and read every single issue (really) for 15 years. But my nostalgia isn't strong enough for me to go back to a traditional newspaper subscription and I doubt that nostalgia will be a viable business model for the newspapers.

I don't have all the answers and maybe I don't have any. But the traditional media had better recognize that you cannot save something which is already extinct. If anyone in my generation ought to be reading a newspaper, it's me. But I've moved on. My children won't even know that there was something to be nostalgic about. We so readily and condescendingly accept that factory workers displaced by globalization need "job training" and "new skills." Why should white collar reporters be immune. Buy a Flip video camera and make us a video, get a decent microphone (actually, shell out for an excellent one) and make us a podcast. Do it now. Do it like your future depends on it.

Cash for Me?

So I see in the news today a picture of a guy turning in his 1999 Ford Explorer for a new car. I remember a lot of moral outrage about bailing out irresponsible homeowners who should have known that they couldn't afford what they were buying. But bailing out irresponsible car-owners who should have known that gas might get more expensive someday is, apparently, the greatest government program since Social Security.

Can someone let me know what the next bailout is going to be for? I'd like to get in on that one since I keep missing these.

Why I've come to like Twitter more than Facebook

I keep seeing Facebook messages from all these 30-somethings I know who are all mad at Twitter for some reason (well, not just for "some reason" but because not knowing how to use Twitter makes them feel old and they've hit an age where they no longer have the time and energy to keep up for the sake of keeping up). I like Twitter a lot better, although some Facebook lovers may not like my reasons:

Twitter, is 90% of what I like about Facebook and none of what I hate. I like seeing pictures of people and Twitter kind of does that but not as well. The main thing I like about Facebook is the status updates and Twitter is basically dedicated to that. I find that people's status updates, even if mundane, kind of tell you what they're really up to or what's really going on in their life. It's not just that someone's kid had a birthday, it's "man I'm totally wiped after 15 6 year olds were over for X's birthday." That's content. The rest of Facebook is, to me, utter crap: (A) I already have an email address, thank you, and I don't need another one. (B) I couldn't care less what animal, rock star, Teletubbie, or mesozoic-era dinosaur some ridiculous quiz says you are. That tells me nothing about you. (C) I don't want to join your cause, bite your vampires, or share my personal information with some random application developer who's probably selling it (my personal information) to Russian identity-thieving mobsters just so you can remember my f'ing birthday. Buy an organizer.