Jam Side Down

The Thriller is Gone

I was down two Ouzos in a country taverna when a snappy kick, snare, and hi-hat commanded my attention. A repetitive bass followed by a four note synth and shaker hooked me before the vocals had even begun.

And not only me. The banter in the crowded Greek bar hushed as people began to dance. They ordered the DJ to play the new hit again. Louder. And again. Soon the crowd was chanting "I Am The One. Who Will Dance. On The Floor. In The Round."

By 3 am we had danced to nothing but "Billie Jean" for five straight hours. We walked to the beach talking about how the precocious kid with the trademark grin and Afro had outgrown his bubble gum days. Michael Jackson's Thriller had blown a hole in pop music with a high energy blend of funk, rock, and disco. The effect was electric and, as I witnessed on a remote Greek island, felt in nearly every corner of the the world.

Quincy Jones, who produced Thriller, hated "Billie Jean" and wanted to cut it from the album. A reviewer termed the song "a five-minute-long nervous breakdown set to a beat" and "one of the most sonically eccentric, psychologically fraught, downright bizarre things ever to land on Top 40 radio".

Billionaire Amazon CEO works in his own warehouse.

He looks like a leprechaun and laughs like a hyena, but do not ever underestimate Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Back in 2006, Amazon accounted for 5.1% of all online sales. Now it accounts for 6% and it's cash flow more than doubled. The company ranks 8th in the Fortune 500 for ten year shareholder returns -- and for most of those ten years it was not profitable. 

I competed with this guy for a decade and frequently thought he was nuts. I questioned almost everything about Amazon, from their international expansion, acquisitions, Kindle, customer obsessiveness, 12 million square feet of DCs, debt load, savage discounting, corporate paranoia, the UI, really high capex, the acronyms programs like AWS, S3, FBA, EC2, and even Prime when it first launched.

And occasionally Bezos blew it (auctions, A9, Living.com/kozmo.com/Pets.com and a lot more, early tab proliferation, the crazy Walmart executives, the gold treasure box that a brilliant but mad professor talked him in to, Segway, digital music, and many other experiments that turned out to be amusing belly flops). But in many of those years, the market paid him to try stuff -- it would be a much bigger criticism to say he had not tested more ideas (see Whitman, Meg).

More often than not, Bezos had ideas that turned out to be game-changing smart. He created a highly experimental culture that learned quickly from its mistakes. Amazon invented associate programs and AB testing, which he used to create the e-commerce operating system. He bet on Prime, the free-shipping program that launched almost three years ago to raspberries from financial analysts. Prime costs Amazon a fortune, but subscribers end up buying more because they do ALL of their online shopping at Amazon. Over time, it has made a huge difference even though, as Bezos warned at the time, "the one thing you do know when you hold an all-you-can-eat buffet, the heavy eaters show up first."

Can Ron Bloom Save the US Auto Industry?

As mentioned in an earlier post, I think very highly of Ron Bloom, the Steelworker Financial adviser just named by President Obama as the non-czar car czar. Ron and Diana Farrell of the National Economic Council will head up the task force that will oversee the restructuring of our car companies. Both are first-rate appointments.

Ron is a bankrutpcy rock star who works out of a union office not a Wall Street highrise. He has jumped into some 50 bankruptcies in the past 20 years and he is very good at it. (And I take nothing from Diana Farrell who, with her McKinsey colleagues, has done some pathbreaking work on global productivity).

Ron and I worked together for almost a year to turn around Algoma Steel (McKinsey was on the other side of the table). Ron did an amazing job -- he is a superb financial analyst, a strong and creative bargainer, and able to find deals in places where deals are very hard to find. He is smart, funny, and mildly profane -- my kind of guy.

After Algoma, Ron went on the staff of the Steelworkers, where he has done more than anyone to help create a competitive US Steel industry. When Ron joined Leo Gerard, the tough and slightly crazy Canadian who had just been elected USWA President, the Autoworkers were twice as big as the Steelworkers. Today, the United Steelworkers are larger and a good bit of that that is due to Ron (and to Leo's courageous decision to put up with a Harvard trained investment banker on his staff).

Bicentennial of Heroes

Today two of my heroes celebrate their 200th birthdays. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. 

Neither Lincoln nor Darwin were especially popular during their lifetimes and for different reasons, both were often caricatured as apes. Lincoln may be remembered as our greatest President, but he was also one of America's most persistent political losers. He lost eight elections, twice failed in business, and suffered a nervous breakdown that kept him in bed for six months following the death of his sweetheart. He was born poor and remained indebted or bankrupt most of his life.

Lincoln's political career was a rolling disaster. As a young man, he ran for election to the Illinois state legislature in 1832 and lost. Elected in 1834, he sought the speakership and lost, sought to become elector in 1840 and lost, then ran for Congress in 1843 and lost. He was elected to Congress in 1846 but lost his bid for reelection in 1848. Ran for the job of "land officer" back home and lost. Ran for Senate in 1854 and lost. Sought the Vice Presidential nomination in 1858, when VPs were still nominated separately and received fewer than 100 votes. So he ran for the Senate again, gave his "house divided cannot stand" and held forth eloquently against slavery in the now famed Lincoln-Douglas debates. He lost. In 1860, the Republicans nominated him for President in an act of desperation. They knew that he was a loser but picked him to avoid a candidate who was known to be anti-slavery like Seward and other more obvious leaders. Lincoln did not campaign for President -- literally did not raise a dime or give a single speech. He was elected anyway and the rest, as they say, is history.

Man from A Place Called Phoenix

Bill Clinton famously campaigned as a man from A Place Called Hope. More impressive, perhaps, is the man from a place called Phoenix.

Recall that the capital of Arizona is named for the mythical bird that manages to ignite itself at the end of its life, reduce itself to ashes, and arise young and reborn. Hard to think of a better symbol for Arizona Senator John McCain.

This guy was ashes only six months ago. He was out of money and widely despised among the Republican establishment, which danced repeatedly on the grave of what they were sure would be a brief campaign.

Jay Leno even got off a one-liner on the subject:

"Sen. John Edwards began what he's calling his poverty tour today. He's visiting people who have no money and no hope. His first stop: John McCain's campaign headquarters."

Tom Delay, the former Republican Speaker under indictment in Texas, has declared that "McCain has done more to hurt  the Republican Party than any elected official I know of". Adding that "we would be drilling in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge today if it were not for John McCain".

"Brick Walls Let us Prove How Badly We Want Things"

Some universities have been asking faculty to give the last lecture of their life. It's a wonderful forcing device: take an hour and tell us everything important that you have learned. For Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor, it was more than a forcing device. The 46 year old father of three small children has a fast-moving and incurable form of pancreatic cancer. Pausch is one of the authors of Alice, a widely used 3-D gaming environment and a longstanding advisor to Electronic Arts and other video gaming companies.

The Wall Street Journal described the talk:

Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he'd won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn't need them anymore.

He paid tribute to his techie background. "I've experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he'd drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it."

Check the highlights here. We all need to get working on our lecture...

 

Chauncey Bailey and Oakland's Nation of Islam

Friday was another gorgeous day in the Bay Area -- the latest in a summer of perfect days. Alibris had a company picnic at the beach in Alameda featuring small children armed with water balloons. I enjoyed cycling home on a bike I have been slowly assembling for a few months. I passed through Oakland's Chinatown -- a living, breathing immigrant neighborhood that, like Oakland itself, gets along fine without the tourist veneer of its celebrity sibling across the bay.

I stopped and got off the bike in a parking lot at the corner of 14th and Alice and paused to remember Chauncey Bailey -- who had been murdered on this spot a few hours earlier. Bailey was the editor of the Oakland Post -- a paper you don't notice much in Oakland. It was not another random Oakland murder: Bailey was investigating the bankruptcy of Oakland's infamous Black Muslim Bakery. The Bakery has been morally bankrupt for nearly twenty years; it had filed for Chapter 11 last October.

"Your Black Muslim Bakery" was founded in 1968 by Nation of Islam leader Yousef Bey -- Oakland's Louis Farrakhan wannabe. Bey lived hard for a man of the cloth: his son was shot and killed outside an Oakland nightclub in 1994, the same year Bey ran for mayor. In 2003, Bey was indicted on 27 counts of rape involving victims who were all girls under under the age of 14. Bey died later that year.

Hitchens vs. God and Islamic Jihad

Our crack shot, karate-chopping, head-bashing action-hero Christopher Hitchens calls a spade a damned shovel in today's Slate. His piece, entitled "Don't Mince Words: The London car-bomb plot was designed to kill women" begins

Why on earth do people keep saying, "There but for the grace of God …"? If matters had been very slightly different over the past weekend, the streets of London and the airport check-in area in Glasgow, Scotland, would have been strewn with charred body parts. And this would have been, according to the would-be perpetrators, because of the grace of God. Whatever our own private theology or theodicy, we might at least agree to take this vile belief seriously.

OK, time out for a confession. I love this guy (as noted here, here, here, and here). The breadth of his intellect and the audacity of his arguments astonishes and convinces. One of my goals in life is to never debate Christopher Hitchens -- and frankly, the list of people I would avoid debating is pretty short.

"No Power in the Market and No Voice in the System"

Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address is being circulated widely in Silicon Valley -- and with good reason. He gave an outstanding speech (rather, he wrote an outstanding speech -- he cannot deliver a speech to save his life).

In the tradition of commencement speeches, Gates reminded grads of their social obligations -- a noblesse oblige for the 21st century social justice that is, conveniently, technology-driven.

Gates was inspired by George Marshall, whose Harvard commencement speech outlined his famous plan to rebuild postwar Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Gates saw a copy of Marshall's speech on the wall of the waiting area prior to meeting with Marshall's successor, Condi Rice.

BDS Spreads as Blair Prepares to Step Down

Timothy Garton Ash, one of Europe's most astute political observers, recently described the extreme reaction of dinner guests to unpopular political leaders.

...The sole duty of any self-respecting commentator is to interrogate and then indict Blair - as if he were a cross between Radovan Karadzic, Augusto Pinochet and Adolf Eichmann...As at many a London dinner table, one's own superior virtue, and one's belonging to the tribe, is demonstrated by the unbounded vehemence of one's denunciation of him. "Not in my name" is all that needs to be said, or rather shouted.

BDS has mutated and spread across the Atlantic. The clinical condition formerly known as Bush Derangement Syndrome -- an emotional disability that causes the afflicted to bark and foam rather like rabid dogs at the mention of the US head of state -- has become Blair Derangement Syndrome. At a time when the Rasmussen Reports finds that "Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure", it is safe to say that BDS has become a serious public health threat and that too many Democrats have been breathing their own exhaust.

Now that Tony Blair has announced his retirement admidst a raging BDS epidemic on both sides of the Atlantic, it is good moment to reflect on Blair's decade as British Prime Minister.

Blair, who just reached that marvelous age of 54 -- took office as the youngest Prime Minister in modern British history. He leaves office as the Labor Party's longest-serving prime minister and the only Labor prime minister in British history to serve more than one full consecutive term. He is also the only person to have ever lead the Labor Party to three consecutive general election victories.

"Rather Be Miserable With Than Without It"

"Rich man he say he would guess
Money can't buy happiness
Poor man he say he don't doubt it
But he'd rather be miserable with than without it."

--- traditional Calypso ditty

Michael Spence is a ridiculously accomplished scholar. Some years back, he won the Clark award given to the nation's best economist under 40. After serving as chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard, he was named Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and then Dean of Stanford's Business School. He not only won the Nobel Prize in Economics, but he won it, a colleague of his reliably informs me, because of research on asymmetric information that he did as a graduate student.

This year Spence has published a series of must-read economics columns in the Wall Street Journal. In January, he presented an economically coherent description of China's growth here, and here and of poor country growth here, and here. In February he wrote warmly about his mentor Tom Schelling, and in March described the link between the trade deficit and the subprime mess here (articles are behind paywall after 90 days). It is thoughtful, smart stuff -- I wish I could learn as fast as this guy can teach.

In a recent presentation, Spence cited the work of another very smart if occasionally shrill economist, Berkeley's Brad DeLong, to make an obvious but remarkable point: economic growth is a fairly new idea. For centuries humans subsisted on $100 dollars per year, measured in terms of what a dollar bought in 1990. DeLong took the work of some population demographers and combined it with reasonable estimates of the size of the world economy going back thousands of years (back to the start of economic times). He compared income levels across countries not using current exchange rates, but instead trying to change one currency into another at rates that keep purchasing power constant ("purchasing power parity").

Scooter and Skilling: Fools or Felons?

Start with my prejudices, which many people share. I do not especially like Dick Cheney's aide Scooter Libby or Enron President Jeff Skilling. Both strike me as men who chose to advance narrow and unworthy goals: the sharp-elbowed, mean-spirited, zero-sum politics of the Cheney/Bush White House or the creation of an energy trading giant built on an ethical and financial house of cards (which was, not incidentally, the largest single contributor to the campaign to create the Cheney/Bush White House).

Then to my preferences: defending powerful people is always frustrating. They don't need it, they rarely deserve it, and you don't get that uplifting moral wind at your back that comes with believing that you speak for the powerless. So when two powerful men are found guilty of serious crimes, there is a strong -- and in my case a very strong -- temptation to smile, figure that they had it coming, indulge in a bit of schadenfreude, and get on with life. It's just light entertainment: for centuries before Shakespeare made it really popular, crowds took pleasure in tales of powerful men brought low.

There is, of course, the nagging matter of justice. The indiscretions of a former colleague has afforded me the opportunity to observe first hand that federal criminal prosecutions are ponderous, complex, highly consequential affairs. US Attorneys are well-equipped to deal with serious criminal behavior but their considerable powers are wasted on the problem of idiots whose idiocy remains within the bounds of the law. Being an idiot turns out to be legal under most circumstances -- and that is probably a very good thing for most of us.

Worse, the use of prosecutors to chase fools frequently leads to collateral damage that vastly exceeds the idiocy under investigation. In Federal Court, friendly fire is a bitch. The Washington Post understands this very well. They got the Libby verdict exactly right today:

David Petraeus, Rock Star General

Throughout the ages, great countries have honored their great warriors. School children are taught the names of our nation's war heros: John Paul Jones, Ulysses S. Grant, Clara Barton, Billy Mitchell, Alvin York, Jimmy Doolittle, Douglas MacArthur. Great warriors are celebrities -- and should be.

Can an army general be a celebrity these days? We may be about to find out -- because it turns out that America has a general who is a rock star among military leaders. If the surge in Iraq is going to work -- and I am an unusual Democrat who supports it and hopes that it will -- it will be thanks to the determination and skill of the Army's newest general.

He is 54 years old and routinely strips off his shirt and challenges soldiers half his age to push up contests -- and whips them. In the rare event they beat him in a short run of four miles or so, he takes them on a ten mile run and just "smokes them" according to a colleague.

People describe him as not only "the most competitive man on the planet" but exceptionally smart. He graduated near the top of his class at West Point. He was accepted into Army Ranger School -- perhaps the most physically and mentally demanding training program on the planet -- and emerged with all three of the top prizes awarded in his class. He earned the George Marshall award not in economics, but as the top graduate in his Army Command and General Staff College. The Army sent him to Princeton, where he quickly earned a PhD in International Relations at the Woodrow Wilson School.

Never Apologize, Never Explain?

Why do most leaders have a hard time apologizing when they screw up? Harry Truman, long one of my favorites, concisely summarized the prevailing wisdom: "Don't ever apologize for anything".

I'm probably missing a chapter here, but why not?

P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves, suggested a reason in The Man Upstairs: "It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them."

Not persuasive, in my experience. When you screw up, you know it and if you are in leadership everyone around you knows it too. Get up, shake the dust off, declare something to the effect that "sorry -- that didn't work, did it?" and move on. No need to grovel -- but no point pretending that all is well either.

Done well, the effect can be touching (Clinton apologizing to Rwandans for ignoring genocide in their country) and it can be restoring (most of us who are married men need to periodically apologize to our wives because face it, usually we are bigger jerks than they are).

It can also be plain disarming as David Neeleman, the Founder and CEO of JetBlue demonstrated this week. His apology began:

"We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.

"Last week was the worst operational week in JetBlue's seven year history. Many of you were either stranded, delayed or had flights cancelled following the severe winter ice storm in the Northeast.

Now JetBlue was not the first airline to royally screw passengers by leaving them couped and canned on the tarmac for 10 hours before take-off -- but this is the first time I've heard an apology from the airline CEO. And he backed it with an "Airline Traveler Bill of Rights", which isn't exactly habeas corpus and freedom of the press, but it does commit the airline to pay you when they blow it next. Which assuredly they will, given how tightly all airlines now schedule equipment and flights.

The apology wasn't just talk. The airline is paying out $10 million in refunds to passengers on canceled flights and issuing $16 million worth of vouchers for future travel to passengers whose flights were delayed. They ran full-page newspaper ads in every big market in the country saying "You deserved better -- a lot better -- from us last week and we let you down," Figure $5-10 million for an ad campaign like that.

Did the market hammer the stock? Nope -- despite the operating losses, the refunds, and the expensive "I'm sorry" campaign, the stock went up more than 2%, leaving JetBlue shareholders $40 million richer at the end of the day than at the start (yeah, I know -- if apologizing pays THAT well, why stop?).

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Cities concentrate people, wealth, culture -- and memories. In New York this week, I walked by an Indian restaurant and recalled a lunch almost twenty years ago with friends who tried to persuade me to come work on Wall Street. Across from the restaurant stood a former men's club where I pitched an IPO fifteen years later and 50 feet further along sat a hotel that I had once lived in for a month as a consultant. These were a trivial fraction of the memories millions of people have of this fairly ordinary midtown block.

At the end of the week, I passed very briefly through Paris. I had a single free evening and realized that it had been exactly thirty years since I spent seven months in Paris studying and wandering. I had been inspired by Hemingway's famous claim that "to be a young man in Paris is a movable feast". When I arrived in 1977, my feast was cold and rainy. I headed to point zero -- the official center of the city in front of the Cathedral Notre Dame. On Friday, I retraced my steps.

Cathedrals, especially old, complete European ones, store memories as well as values. I remembered staying late at Notre Dame, listening to choral music with my backpack at my feet, happy for shelter and warmth after a long flight. Eventually however, I had to face a disconcerting reality: I had no place to spend the night. My savings of $2,000 had to last many months. I wandered perhaps 100 yards from the cathedral and came to 37 Rue de la Bucherie, sort of an extension to Notre Dame -- a bookstore I had never heard of that has greeted wanderers for more than half a century. It is a cathedral of books -- a bookstore unlike any other in the world (its closest companion, City Lights in San Francisco, is a hip pretender by comparison -- as its name all but acknowledges).

Quick, the Invisibility Cloak!

Arrived in London to find 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe making damned sure that he doesn't get type cast for his film role as Harry Potter.

Radcliffe is upstaging the recent announcement of the final Harry Potter book by preparing to appear on the West End stage in a revival of Peter Shaffer's controversial play Equus. This is when Radcliffe is not filming the fifth and sixth Harry Potter movies or even, one might presume, finishing high school.

Daniel, his lady friend who is assuredly not Hermione Granger, and his horse each make extended appearance on stage without clothing - and Daniel's character, Alan Strang, both blinds horses and then rides around having sex while riding them. The move has significantly reduce costume and marketing expenses; advance ticket sales are already over a million British pounds -- threatening to dwarf advance sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Neither Hermione nor her alter ego, author J.K.Rowling, have commented yet, but most Muggles have responded by declaring their outrage and then promptly buying tickets. This is London reports the reaction of some parents:

'We as parents feel Daniel should not appear nude. Our nine-year-old son looks up to him as a role model. We are very disappointed and will avoid the future movies he makes.'

Another wrote: 'I am curious as to how and why his parents said this was OK.'

Well, they grow up quickly, don't they? It seems unlikely that Radcliffe will bring his artistic talents to the United States until he turns eighteen. The penalty for child obscenity and child pornography in the US can run to decades in the slammer. In US vs Knox, the courts famously held that material could be judged pornographic even if the the person under 18 is fully clothed.

Or maybe the whole thing is another one of those Polyjuice Potion tricks...

      Technorati : Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter 

The Speech

It is by a considerable distance the finest American speech of the twentieth century. In its staging and phrasing, it consciously evoked the finest American speech ever, delivered nearly one hundred years earlier nearly one hundred miles away.

Watch it, or read Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech to hundreds of thousands of people who gathered for the 1963 march on Washington here, then judge for yourself:

• It is better than our best presidential inaugurals. FDR, JFK and Reagan's firsts are each considered best in class by most historians.
• It's better than the presidential speeches that rallied America through crisis, including FDR's Day of Infamy, Reagan's Challenger remarks, or JFK's address on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• It is better than the finest partisan barn burners including convention keynotes from Barbara Jordan in '76, Jesse Jackson or Mario Cuomo in '84, or Barack Obama in '04.

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech was fired in a tough, divisive, complex, and bitter political struggle of the sort that Americans today under age forty have never experienced. The march on Washington itself was a highly controversial tactic. As buses jammed into Washington, DC from around the nation, President Kennedy increased political pressure on the marchers. He wanted King to tone down his demands and to not denounce the federal government for its failure to safeguard civil rights or to protect protesters from police violence. King agreed to so many of these demands that Malcolm X denounced the march as the "Farce on Washington" and suspended any Nation of Islam members who attended.

But then King delivered a soaring, poetic, yet biting address that has been studied for years for its cadence and metaphor as well as its political values and claims. Like most of America's great orators, King did not separate church and state -- he spoke confidently of faith, redemption, charity, caring, and community. He was, after all, leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The speech was amplified by a new technology: television broadcast by national networks. America did not know King and was not expecting a 34 year old black man with a PhD to methodically, eloquently, and passionately call the nation to its better self. White America, whether rich or poor, northern or southern, urban or rural, liberal or conservative had never seen a deeply intelligent, militant, nonviolent black minister demand that we overcome prejudice, confront injustice, and honor black Americans. I turned 11 years old the day before the speech and recall clearly the discomfort that King caused my family and neighbors during the summer of '63 and the even hotter summers that followed.

The speech made King the visible and irrevocable leader of the US civil rights movement. Within months, he became the youngest person in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize -- arguably the most prestigious award on the planet.

The march and the speech inspired the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- the most far-reaching piece of legislation in the twentieth century (a bill that survived the longest filibuster in US history and passed Congress mainly as a tribute to the slain JFK. After signing the bill, Lyndon Johnson -- a progressive Texan who knew how to count votes -- reportedly lamented that "we have lost the South for a generation"). Two generations later, he appears to have been optimistic.

On King's birthday, check out his speech. It is worth commemoration and study.

      Technorati : I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King 

To Infinity and Beyond: Steve Jobs Does it Again

Every year at this time I make a habit of watching the finest business presentation on the planet: the Steve Jobs keynote address at Mac World. The event is held nearby, but I watch the film to see Jobs present new results, products, and businesses. On Tuesday Jobs keynoted MacWorld 2007.

He is surely one of the great pitch-men of all time. He quivers with excitement about his products and damn near levitates his adoring audience. For the last decade, he has made better use of graphics than any speaker I've seen. No lame PowerPoint here -- just a single number that is two-stories high, then fade to black so the spotlight can return to Steve -- where everybody wants it to be. Jobs is a spellbinder, a corporate rock star with a hypnotic hold on his faithful.

In some weird way all of us who are technology entrepreneurs wish we were Steve Jobs -- and many other people do as well. Having on two occasions seen them together in small groups, I think that even Bill Gates wishes he were Steve Jobs -- especially since Jobs' keynote at MacWorld completely upstaged Gates' awful speech about "digital lifestyles" at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A Freak of Nurture

Michael Lewis on Race, Class, and Football

Michael Lewis (author of the must-read Liar's Poker and Moneyball as well as the somewhat less terrific New New Thing) recently published The Blind-Side: Evolution of a Game. Despite the title, this book is only partly about football.

Lewis likes to describe an industry undergoing a fundamental transformation (Wall Street during the late 80's, Major League Baseball or internet companies during the 90's) and to profile someone helping lead the change (John Goodfriend at Salomon Brothers, Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, Jim Clark of Netscape). He has a great sense of humor and an unfailing eye for comic detail.

Blind Side adheres to the formula then manages to transcend it -- which is why this is Lewis' best book yet. Lewis chronicles a series of profound shifts in professional football that originate with the West Coast Offense. In the 1980s, Bill Walsh notices that the running game in football is like a mature industry: performance does not improve with the application of resources, innovation, or world class talent. For decades, NFL rushers had averaged 4-5 yards per carry and fumbled about 3% of the time. Runners became bigger and faster, plays became more complex -- but defensive players adapted. Four decades after Ohio State's Woody Hayes pioneered the "three yards and a cloud of dust" offense, the running game was still about the same. So Walsh focused on pioneering a new approach to the passing game. By the time he became head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, he had built a novel and highly productive offense around short, wide passes. It represented a fundamental change and the results transformed professional football. Suddenly Joe Montana and Jerry Rice -- along with other quarterbacks and tight ends -- become household names.

American Oracle: Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman died today at age 92. Seems like he was just getting started.

Friedman was easily one of the dozen most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was a founding father of modern monetary policy. In his hugely influential magnum opus A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 written with Anna J. Schwartz, Friedman used historical narrative and reams of supporting data to argue that steady control of the money supply is crucial in steering the economy. The book famously critiqued the Federal Reserve's performance during the Great Depression and was a major influence on a generation of economists and the Reagan administration.

But that's not why I liked him -- I barely understand that stuff, even though it matters enormously. I liked that Friedman was a feisty crusading public intellectual and that he was, at bottom, the entrepreneur's economist.

They’re Tryin’ To Wash Us Away: Randy Newman at Carnegie Hall

I got two pleasant musical surprises while in New York on business this week. Last night a friend snuck me into an event with Sting, who was signing his new CD at a local Barnes & Noble. Sting turns out to be short, fit, and pretty nice for an Irish rock star who got a Columbian tree frog named after him. (Ayla stingi -- courtesy of environmental scientists grateful for his leadership of the Rainforest Foundation and related causes. A frog is pretty good -- the Beatles, Stones, and Grateful Dead only got trilobites ).

Tonight my evening plans changed at the last minute, so I checked out the playbill at nearby Carnegie Hall. Bingo! Randy Newman is in town so I hustled a ticket that turned out to be at the geometric center of the beautiful, understated Stern Auditorium. Hadn't seen Randy Newman perform since the early 80's - about when I last saw Sting.

Newman delivered a warm and wonderful show and revealed things about himself that I had not seen before. For starters, I think of him him as a southern California guy. He was born in Los Angeles and went to UCLA (not Stanford, as his song "Take Me Back" suggests). He had three uncles in Los Angeles who were successful composers, conductors, and musicians in and around the movie business, so he basically followed the family trade.

Although he is a born and bred in LA, he is more southerner than Angelino. His family moved immediately to New Orleans ("the land of dreams") as soon as he was born and traveled between the two cities throughout his childhood. When you hear his lyrics live, you hear a southerner's sense of place - not like anything I got growing up in LA, which is about as rootless as it gets. Like Faulkner's short stories, Newman's songs often evoke the tone and feelings of a specific time and town. Three samples from tonight:

Sexonomics

During the 1970s, I worked in an enormous machine shop in Sunnyvale, California. It was noisy, messy, boring, and occasionally dangerous. Silicon Valley was popping up all around us, creating technology that would change the world -- but we carried lunch buckets and cut metal for a living. Perhaps a thousand machinists, operators, tool and die guys -- almost all men. A huge place, with several acres under roof. Your basic slice out of the nineteenth century sitting smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was reported to be the largest machine shop west of the Mississippi and amazingly, the place appears to still be operating.

Naturally, every company that sold machine tools sent salesmen to call on our shop. They left color brochures of the latest in computerized mills, lathes, drill presses, etc. As often as not the pictures advertising machine tools featured a woman in a bikini. I recall seeing ads for tractors and earth-moving equipment that did the same thing.

Now I understand that sex sells booze, sports cars, clothing, exotic travel, nice restaurants, and a lot of other things associated with romance. But do attractive women in bathing suits really help sell big, smelly, oily, slice-your-hand-off-in-a-nanosecond machine tools?

The right guy to answer this question is Steven Levitt, economist and author of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Levitt (winner of the 2003 Clark Medal, explained here) has produced a delightful unfocused romp of a bestseller that finds economic causes of things that you might not, at first glance anyway, think had anything to do with economics.

Well, it turns out that Levitt's book was translated into Turkish but wasn't selling well in Turkey. So the publisher reissued it with a new cover, shown at left. Maybe economics in Turkey is more fun than I thought. Or perhaps Levitt knows something I don't about selling economics books. Or did those guys who used to write the machine tool ads finally find work overseas? (Thanks: Marginal Revolution)

      Technorati : Freakonomics 

Why I Love Oakland

There are plenty of things not to like about living in Oakland, California. Gertrude Stein famously asserted that "The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there". She was right at one level -- this isn't really a tourist town. And our public services can be appalling. One of the city's "Arbocultural Specialists" attempted to fine me $23,000 for cutting down a dying tree in my back yard that it was about to fall on my neighbor's house because it was a redwood. A city employee once charged me a $400 fee to not to do planning work. The political center of gravity of this town is, to quote Jason Robard's memorable description of his sister in A Thousand Clowns, "somewhere to the left of 'Whopee!'"

But every now and then Oakland reminds me why I love this place. Sometimes it's the music, sometimes it's the glorious weather, but mostly it's the incredible variety of people. This is still a blue collar, broad-shouldered town -- former home of Jack London and current home to the Raiders. It is mostly unpretentious. If you like humanity in all of its variety -- all of it -- then you will be in heaven just to walk, listen, and eat in this town.

Political Entrepreneurs: Schwarzenegger, Lieberman, and Gingrich

Public political leadership freezes many people, which is why most politicians sound like jukeboxes with a small set of records they play again and again. As a result, there is little I admire more in political leaders than the ability to learn, grow, and change.

It is a powerfully dynamic and complex world out there -- leaders who can apply consistent principles and come up with workable solutions are important to our future. Few of these people care deeply about their political party, except as a vehicle for promoting innovative ideas and people.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are three such leaders. I have criticized all three men on occasion and have no particular interest in any of them (indeed one displaced the Democratic Governor of my state shortly after he had been elected, one retracted a lifelong commitment to a cause I hold dear, progressive school vouchers, in order to run for Vice President, and one defunded a federal agency that I had spent three years building).

Oriana Fallaci

The lioness is dead. She didn't die as a teenage resistance fighter when, as a member of the Tuscan anti-fascist underground, she carried messages and explosives in Nazi Florence. She did not die at the execution wall in Mexico City in 1968, although she was shot and left for dead. She didn't die reporting from the world's worst war zones, she was not killed by the powerful who came to tremble at her pen, nor by the fatwa issued by an Islamic jihadist calling for her death.

Marc Steyn, who would qualify as a sort of Canadian Fallaci, if such a Centaur were not a violation of nature, captured Oriana Fallaci's combination of research and rage in a fine obit that quoted Fallaci's scathing assessment of Khomeni's Blue Laws (Khomeni: "A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin." Indeed.) and recalls his review of her most recent book:

Over in Sweden (says Fallaci), they've been investigating the Grand Mosque of Stockholm. Apparently, it's the one-stop shop for all your jihad needs: you can buy audio cassettes at the mosque encouraging you to become a martyr and sally forth to kill "the brothers of pigs and apes" - ie, Jews. So somebody filed a racial-incitement complaint and the coppers started looking into it, and then Sweden's Chancellor of Justice, Goran Lambertz, stepped in. And Mr Lambertz decided to close down the investigation on the grounds that, even though the porcine-sibling stuff is "highly degrading", this kind of chit-chat "should be judged differently - and therefore be regarded as permissible - because they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds this conflict".

In other words, if you threaten to kill people often enough, it will be seen as part of your vibrant cultural tradition - and, by definition, we're all cool with that. Celebrate diversity, etc. Our tolerant multicultural society is so tolerant and multicultural we'll tolerate your intolerant uniculturalism. Your antipathy to diversity is just another form of diversity for us to celebrate.

Fallaci would cheer

Virgopundits

Celebrating a bit over the weekend. Deck finished and family came to visit for my Sunday birthday.

I feel some kinship with people born on my birthday: Confucius, Hegel, LBJ, Mother Theresa (by most accounts), CS Forrester, Harvest Books' Eugene Okamoto, PeeWee Herman, and the blogfodda himself, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

Now that you mention it -- a pretty mixed crew.

 

 

The JamKid

Here is the JamKid. Roughly normal for 14. Perhaps a bit too influenced by our current Governor, hard to say. Very into computer graphics at the moment.

A wonderful, sweet guy, although the forehand is getting nasty and the topspin on the hard serves can surprise the heck out of you. Almost as tall as the jamwife now.

For his 14th birthday, I gave him the card I got on my 14th. Saved it nearly 40 years. It had Rudyard Kipling inside:

 

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

"Thanks, Dad -- I needed a sermon from the Poet Laureate of British Empire. You know, sometimes the guy who 'keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs' is the one running the guillotine."

True. It's complicated out there. Values matter more than rules; integrity more than philosophy. The JamKid will do fine.

Nothing Left to Lose

For most people, age 27 is prime time. You are usually done with school, although hopefully not with learning. You are making your own way in the world. You are young and strong but ideally less foolish than you had been a decade earlier. You may even be in a stable, more-or-less adult, relationship. If the past was good, the future looks even better. 27 is a good age.

Unless, of course, you were a rock star in the early 1970s, in which case at age 27 you died, often thanks to a drug overdose. Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones died on drugs at age 27. Jimi Hendrix was 27 when he died on pills. Jim Morrison was 27 when he lit his final fire in Paris. Pigpen McKernan, dead from alcohol but not grateful at age 27. These were among he most talented and successful musicians of the 1960s. WTF?

Zinedine Zidane: Ending on a Low Note

He is widely held to be the most complete soccer player alive. For the past two decades, many argue that he has been the greatest player of the world's most popular sport. He inspires crowds, he inspires his team mates, and he inspires his countrymen, who call him "Zizou". He is Zinedine Zidane, a soccer god and symbol of the best of France -- in part because he is of Algerian descent in a country that does not easily celebrate its immigrants.

The 2006 World Cup was his to take -- and at age 34, it would be his swan song. A few wondered whether he still had the brilliance he had shown when he scored two of France's three goals in its 1998 World Cup victory over Brazil. The game made him a football icon and a hero to hundreds of millions of fans around the world. In 2004, he had been voted the best European player for the past 50 years. The the Global Soccer Federation (FIFA) named him the World Player of the Year in 1998, 2000, and 2003. Soccer legend and teammate Thierry Henry once said of Zidane that "he does things with his feet that others cannot do with their hands".

Today's World Cup championship match was to be the culmination of this brilliant career and more than one billion people would be watching in perhaps the largest television, radio, satellite, and Internet audience ever assembled on planet earth. Many analysts expected him to win the Golden Ball -- the MVP for World Cup play. Zidane has had a brilliant tournament and few had a greater claim to the prize. Today, one sixth of humanity stopped to watch Zizou play soccer. Few men in history have earned or received such a moment of triumph.

Zidane's victory was to be rich in political symbolism. An Algerian triumphant in France. France victorious on the world stage, after a series of embarrasing political catastrophes documented here, here, and here. Zidane victorious in Berlin, where Hitler held the 1936 Olympics as a monument to Aryan superiority and Jesse Owens, a black American, won three gold medals. Coming from France, where anti-Semitism curses Jew and Arab alike and where rightists such as Jean Marie Le Pen oppose the current French team because some of its players are of African origin, Zidane would remind the world that talent, dedication, and inspiration matter more than birth or race. Zizou would make today important and the world would be watching.

Instead, Zidane blew it. He disgraced himself, his team, and his country in front of a billion people. I cannot recall a moment in sports history when genius and madness were connected so closely.

The Dear Train Collector

North Korea is an economic train wreck in part because its neglected trains are falling apart. It is hard to run a garrison economy with broken trains. Hat tip to Strategy Page for discovering the creative approach devised by the Dear Leader to solve this vexing problem:

"..food and fuel supplies sent (from China) to North Korea have been halted, not to force North Korea to stop missile tests or participate in peace talks, but to return the Chinese trains the aid was carried in on. In the last few weeks, the North Koreans have just kept the trains, sending the Chinese crews back across the border. North Korea just ignores Chinese demands that the trains be returned, and insists that the trains are part of the aid program. It's no secret that North Korean railroad stock is falling apart, after decades of poor maintenance and not much new equipment. Stealing Chinese trains is a typical loony-tune North Korean solution to the problem."

What kind of nut job steals trains from the people who are feeding him? CNN has the answer

"Here's a guy who is very concerned about his physical stature, among other things," says Dr. Jerold Post, a former CIA psychologist who now heads the Political Psychology program at George Washington University. "He's 5-foot-2 and wears four-inch lifts in his shoes."

Dr. Post, in his study of the Korean dictator, says Kim Jong Il also loves to drink a certain Hennessey cognac that sells for $630 a bottle in Korea. "He is the largest customer over the last 10 years, averaging between $650,000 and $720,000 a year in purchases -- while the average [North] Korean earns only about $900 a year."

There are other strange details about this man, according to Dr. Post. "He's recruited these 'joy brigades,' where he finds these attractive young women as early as junior high to entertain senior officials." Kim Jong Il also lives in a seven-story "pleasure palace," Post says, "and sees himself as a great creative force."

Dr. Post recalls that Kim Jong Il once kidnapped the most prominent South Korean movie star and kept her under house arrest with her husband for eight years."

Another tidbit about this man: He has a collection of some 20,000 videotapes, including the James Bond movie collection. "He is fascinated by the media and in fact cruises the Web as well," he says.

Nice to know that nuclear missiles are in safe hands.

Tomorrow Never Knows

"turn off your mind, relax, float downstream"

-- Timothy Leary, as appropriated by John Lennon

Did you catch the Sunday New York Times review by Luc Sante of the Robert Greenfield biography of Timothy Leary? For a cultural icon, Leary always seemed odd and ill at ease -- he gave the impression of having done just a touch more acid than is medically wise. I have not read the Greenfield book but the Times review is entirely complementary and serves to remind us that the sixties produced people in public and cultural life who were amazing, astonishing whackos. Sante:

...although he was among the major protuberances in the cultural bouillabaisse we call The Sixties, he was not much of a 60's type himself, as Robert Greenfield demonstrates in his thorough and judicious biography. While he may have been the leading spokesmodel for LSD, Leary remained to the end an old-fashioned booze hound, as well as a snake-oil peddler of the most traditional American sort. Had he been born a decade or two earlier, he would probably have been offering to cure arthritis through the application of the electric belt.

Leary was admitted to West Point (!) and kicked out for "blatant transport of hooch" as the Times puts it. Drove his first wife to suicide while climbing the Berkeley/Harvard faculty ladder.

He was initially known as an expert on personality assessment (!), but, while on a sojourn in Mexico the following year, he was introduced to psilocybin mushrooms, and the experience was so transformative that psychedelics promptly became the central force in his life, his research and his teaching. Along with his colleague Richard Alpert, son of the president of the New Haven Railroad (and today a guru known as Ram Dass), Leary tried to turn on all of Harvard.

Tripping with students got both Leary and Ram Dass booted from Harvard (and getting fired from the Harvard faculty takes effort and perisistence). Leary moved west and brought LSD to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other members of the literary and artistic avant-garde. He picked up some very wealthy devotees, acquired the use of a fabulous mansion in upstate New York where he held a party that went on for five years. What happened next was a perfect Age of Aquarius moment:

....by 1969 (Leary) had accumulated enough outstanding indictments, mostly on penny ante marijuana charges, that he finally went to jail, and was likely to be kept there for years before he would be considered for parole. Characteristically, he compared himself to "Christ . . . harassed by Pilate and Herod."

In a twist that could have occurred only in 1970, a consortium of drug dealers paid the Weather Underground to spring Leary from the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo - he pulled himself along a telephone cable over the fence, then was picked up by a car - and transport him to Algeria. He duly issued a press statement written in the voice of the Weathermen, the money line of which was: "To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act."

But when he and his wife, Rosemary, arrived in Algiers, they found themselves wards of the exiled Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who was probably smarter than Leary, possibly crazier, and had little use for him. As Leary acknowledged, rather shrewdly: "It was a new experience for me to be dependent on a strong, variable, sexually restless, charismatic leader who was insanely erratic. I usually played that role myself."

Oh -- and the book doubtless mentions, although Times review doesn't, Leary's exile in Kabul, Afghanistan, his being called "the most dangerous man in America" by Richard Nixon, his campaign for Governor of California, and his decision to videotape his death and send his ashes into space along with Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry.

Small wonder that kids don't believe that the sixties happened. You really can't make this stuff up.

What I Look for In a Resume

I have been interviewing job candidates lately. Tonight a guy going to college who used to work construction on Barbados and wants to handle my kids (bring the hammer). Earlier this week a few others. The cliches about hiring, like a lot of cliches, are true: good people are hard to find and it is enormously important to find them.

Two things that I have come to value: passion and broad, diverse experience. And tonight I found one of the best resumes yet -- from Matt Harding in Seattle. Not that Matt is looking for work.

Matt likes to write about himself in the third person:

Matt is a 29-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. He achieved this goal pretty early on and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. In February of 2003, he quit his job in Brisbane, Australia and used the money he'd saved to wander around the planet until it ran out. He made this site so he could keep his family and friends updated about where he is.

A few months into his trip, a travel buddy gave Matt the idea of dancing everywhere he went and recording it on his camera. This turned out to be a very good idea....The response to the first video brought Matt to the attention of the nice people at Stride long-lasting gum. They asked Matt if he'd be interested in taking another trip around the world to make a new video. Matt asked if they'd be paying for it. They said yes. Matt thought this sounded like another very good idea.

At the start of 2006, Matt left on a 6 month trip through 39 countries on all 7 continents. In that time, he danced a great deal.

Matt dances very badly, but most people don't seem to mind.

Check out the maps of his travels here. His travel blogs here. And his amazing video on U-Tube below. This guy will get a job interview almost anywhere he wants.

Harvard's Loss: Farewell to Larry Summers

This week marks the end of Larry Summers Presidency of Harvard University and an appropriate moment to reflect on what a remarkable presidency it was.

I don't know Larry Summers well, although we served together in the Clinton Administration and met in small meetings a half dozen times. His reputation in the administration was as an enfant terrible or, as one wag put it, "the part of the brain that supplies emotional intelligence, Larry redeployed for extra IQ". The man is unquestionably very bright.

Summers attended MIT and Harvard and at age 28 became one of the youngest tenured professors in the three century plus history of Harvard. His work on development economics earned him the coveted John Bates Clark medal, (JBC) in 1993 -- perhaps the profession's most prestigious award, granted each year to the nation's most promising young economist.

Larry Summers has perhaps the world's best genetic endowment as an economist. He is the son of two University of Pennsylvania economists and the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics. His father's brother is Paul Samuelson (won the first JBC in 1947 and the second Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970. It was Larry's dad who changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers). His mother's brother is Kenneth Arrow (JBC 1957, Nobel 1972), who was roughly the Larry Summers of the Kennedy administration.

Summers has a gift for attracting capable mentors: Martin Feldstein (JBC 1977) at Harvard and Bob Rubin at Treasury. One suspects that both men sensed an unusual, if somewhat volatile, talent. Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary and served for the final year and a half of the Clinton Administration.

Summers has demonstrated rather less of a gift for selecting his fights as a leader. His brief careers at the World Bank, at the Treasury Department, and at Harvard were marked by controversy. Some of these controversies were productive, but many more were the result of ill-considered comments. As much as I admire Summers, I wish he had invested his leadership capital more wisely. As little regard as I have for the collective wisdom of tenured faculty, Summers became a difficult leader for the University to support. Summers was not usually wrong -- but he was often unwise. A very bright mentor of mine once cautioned me that "leadership is not an IQ contest". Summers never took this lesson to heart.

Eeyore Gore: The Sad Soul of a Vice President

Wikipedia describes the great Pooh's favorite Democrat:

"He is a pessimistic, gloomy, old donkey who is a friend of Winnie the Pooh. Eeyore is hardly ever happy and when he is, he is still sardonic and a bit cynical. His grumpiness might be attributed to the fact that his tail is affixed to his behind using a pushpin. Nevertheless, he seems genuinely appreciative of the efforts of his friends to cheer him up...

Eeyore is always overlooked and is often used as a beast of burden... Nearly all of Eeyore's houses have fallen down, been knocked down, or been bounced down. Eeyore is not good at rebuilding the houses; butterflies often knock them down just by landing on them. Yet, like tortured Sisyphus, he soldiers on and rebuilds again, time after time.

Hard to come up with a better symbol of the tired, depressed Democratic Party. But Eeyore Gore is running. Unfortunately, he is running on empty.

Look to Crossover Governors for President

What do Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming all have in common? Right! All voted for Bush in 2004 and all have Governors who are Democrats. OK, how about California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont? Yep -- all went Blue in the 2004 race but elected Republican governors.

40% of our states vote one way for President and another for Governor -- and I'd bet that our crossover governors are some of the best leaders we've got.

Of course, not all crossover governors are impressive. Kathleen Blanco proved herself the Nero of New Orleans during Katrina. Public employee unions turned der Arnold into a girlie-man after he poked them in the eye. But absent serious opposition, he'll be back (and next time, it won't be the eye).

Many of these governors are strong managers: Tennessee's Phil Bredesen led the state through a budget crisis without raising taxes or cutting education spending. Linda Lingle is the Republican governor of the most Democratic state in the union (and a Jew and former union hack to boot -- I gotta meet this woman). She has pushed through a broad governmental reform and carries approval ratings in the high 60's. Most have avoided increasing taxes: Bill Richardson claims that he has cut taxes in New Mexico and increased investment in infrastructure. Mitt Romney has passed a state health care plan that claims to offer universal health care without increasing taxes on business.

Where do good presidents come from? There is no single answer, but experience in the executive branch helps. Of the 19 presidents since the start of the twentieth century, eight previously held elected executive branch positions as Governor and five as Vice President. Only two legislators were elected President during this time: John Kennedy and Warren Harding, both Senators.

Presidential scholars rank the effectiveness of past Presidents. The correlation between prior experience and future performance is strong but not perfect. Four out of our five best twentieth century presidents (both Roosevelts, Wilson, and Truman) had held elected executive branch positions. Truman's experience was only 81 days however, and the exception, Dwight Eisenhower, had extensive unelected experience in the executive branch. Likewise three out of our five weakest presidents had no prior experience as elected executives: Ford, Hoover, and Harding. On the other hand, Calvin Coolidge was an undistinguished governor and an undistinguished Vice President before becoming an undistinguished president.

Although Governors and Vice Presidents make the best presidents, both Republicans and Democrats are at the moment infatuated with candidates who are now Senators. John McCain and Hillary Clinton are intelligent and hard-working, but neither has a record of executive leadership. The last Republican Senator to run for President was crushed by a former governor and now sells Viagra. The last Democratic Senator to run for President lost narrowly to a weak, inarticulate, unpopular former governor.

We have governors and former governors who are well-qualified for the presidency. Several (Bill Richardson, Mitt Romney, Tom Vilsack, and Mark Warner) are ready to run.

Two of our most interesting governors (Jennifer Granholm and Arnold Schwarzenegger) cannot run for President because they were not born in the United States. This dumb 18th century rule is worth repealing: if America elects you, the job should be yours. Let voters sort it out. Frankly, if Americans want to elect Tony Blair to the White House, I say make it legal. We could do worse -- and we have.

"The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army" George Washington, July 2, 1776

I was fortunate to speak recently with David McCullough, author of 1776, John Adams, Truman, a wonderful volume of essays called Brave Companions, and other well rendered bits of US history. McCullough began writing for USIA in Washington, DC when it was run by Edward R. Murrow. He is now the father or grandfather of seventeen and the kind of person we all wish to be when we get older: a teller of magnificent stories with a rich sense of history and values.

McCullough is not only a Pulitzer Prize winning author, he is an accomplished painter as well. He describes painting as a great way to learn composition; he believes that his writing benefits from the practice of focus, balance, and deciding what to leave out that comes from painting. Brave Companions opens with an essay that details these and other connections between painting and writing.

This volume also contains a captivating essay about Alexander Von Humboldt whose travels in South America, McCullough noted, "made the Louis and Clark expedition look like a Sunday stroll in the park." When I asked why Von Humboldt would not make a wonderful subject for a full length book since he was a pathbreaking explorer, a reknowned and influencial scientist, a widely admired writer and is frequently judged to be the 19th century's most famous person after Napoleon. McCullough is aware that his gifts have limits: "I would love to", he said, "but I would need to read old French a lot better than I do."

I have not quite finished 1776, but am amazed at the challenge that George Washington faced in forming and retaining an army of free men.

Americans were not especially loyal to the cause of independence: McCullough estimates that no more than a third of the population favored independence and at least a third actively opposed it. Enlistment in what came to be called the Continental Army was voluntary and accomplished via state militias which were poorly equipped, poorly paid, miserably led, and frequently little more than drinking parties. Finally, illness was a huge risk of military life, with "camp fever" (typhus or dysentary) and smallpox extracting a frightening toll. Not surprisingly, volunteers would frequently reconsider and simply return home.Washington's military errors, which were nearly catastrophic on more than one occassion, did little to hold his army together.

The Caged Virgin: Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

News from Christopher Hitchens on the articulate, attractive, and extraordinarily brave Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Originally born in Somalia, she had been a refugee in several African countries and eventually a refugee from her own family, which had decided to "give" her in marriage to a distant male relative she had never met. Thinking to escape from such confines by moving to the Netherlands, she was appalled to find that radical Islam had followed her there--or in fact preceded her there--and was proselytizing among Turkish and Moroccan and Indonesian immigrants. In ancient towns like Rotterdam and Amsterdam, where once the refugees from Catholic France and inquisitional Spain had sought refuge, and where Baruch Spinoza had been excommunicated and anathematized for his opposition to Jewish fundamentalism, there were districts where Muslim women were subjected to genital mutilation and where the Dutch police were afraid to set foot.

She proceeded to collaborate with Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh, whose fate burns the Dutch psyche to this day:

She was the ideal choice of collaborator for the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (a distant descendant of the anguished painter) on Submission, a film about the ignored problem of enslaved and oppressed women in Holland. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote the screenplay and provided the movie's voice-over.

You probably remember what happened next: Van Gogh was bicycling to work one morning in 2004 in the capital city of one of Europe's most peaceful and civilized countries when he was shot down in the street and then mutilated in a ritual fashion by an Islamist fanatic. The murderer (who had expected to become a martyr but who was only wounded in the leg by the gentle Dutch cops) left a long "martyr's letter" pinned to van Gogh's corpse by an equally long knife. In it, he warned Ayaan Hirsi Ali that she was the next target, and he gave a long and detailed account of all the offenses that would condemn her to an eternity in hell.

Read the whole thing here and buy her book The Caged Virgin here (I just did. Review coming soon). Hitch indicates that this matter is progressing very badly. The Dutch would seem to have a great deal to answer for.

Ed Koch: Better with Age

Former NYC mayor Ed Koch hits the right notes over at RCP. Play close attention to Hizzoner’s link: if you know blog authoring software, you can see that the article was initially titled "Do the Democrats Have the Resolve?". Koch evidently softened the title to "Democrats Can Win, But Not By Bashing Bush", in hopes that his junior senator will give it a read. She should - even if the original title was better.

Koch:

On the international front, the overriding issue facing our country is whether Americans have the will to denounce, resist and vanquish the fanatic Islamists who hate democratic values, who engage in terrorism, and who want to kill us and say so. Take them at their brazen word. When Hitler wrote "Mein Kampf," we failed to take him at his word and lived to regret it. Sixty million people ultimately paid with their lives.

A majority of Muslims and their leaders oppose these fanatics. But out of a worldwide Muslim population of 1.4 billion in 52 countries, the fanatics and their sympathizers number in the hundreds of millions. Further, their opponents, e.g., the leaders of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf states that seek to resist bin-Laden and his extreme ideology are themselves in great danger of being overthrown by fanatics in their own countries. Those fanatics call moderate Muslim leaders and their supporters infidels and seek to assassinate them. President Musharraf of Pakistan has been the subject of at least three such attempts.

Every course of action -- diplomatic and economic -- should be used to prevent the bomb from being acquired by the Iranians, but if that approach fails, what then? I support the wisdom of Senator John McCain who summed up his position which I believe should also be that of the U.S. when he said, "There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option, that is, a nuclear-armed Iran."

Will the Democratic Party convince American voters that it has the resolve to protect us from the terrorism of Islamic fanatics? If it does not, it won’t win the next election, notwithstanding the failures and the botching of our occupation of Iraq by the Bush administration.

Koch then reminds Dems of our core domestic social commitments and yells at us for sitting on our collective rears. This guy was a great mayor during the 80’s -- more than any other restored GAAP accounting and the fiscal health of New York City. Koch was politically ambidextrous -- he could and did run as a liberal Republican or a conservative Democrat. Has this trademark "Howmydoin’?" schtick First sitting politician to tell the press to "F**k Off" when they asked about his private life. Served in France with the 104th Infantry, the legendary Timberwolf Division that fought for 195 consecutive days during WWII. By no possible stretch a war-monger. Part of the Greatest Generation, but at 81 probably has too many miles on his odometer (and too many enemies) to run another race. Too bad - times like this, we could all use a tough and independent Rabbi.

Chris Anderson on demand you thought you'd never find

Caught up with Chris Anderson this morning. Chris runs a terrific blog and left me with a sneak preview of his forthcoming book: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The book is an ode to niche markets and is exceptionally well written (it also has a couple of flattering things to say about Alibris).

Chris is a physicist who learned journalism at the magazines Science and Nature and became a business and technology writer at The Economist. He is now editor-in-chief of Wired and is a careful, thoughtful guy.

His book is going to be important because he is among the first to notice that for the first time in human history we can realistically ask what people want when production and distribution costs fall to the point where everything is available to everyone. It turns out that we want very different things. This has big implications for an economy still oriented towards mass markets. Chris summarizes his findings as:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

For a more complete summary of Chris’ thinking, see this or read his original Wired article on the Long Tail here. For the statistically inclined, it is worth thinking about the long tail as part of a larger Power Law distribution phenomenon that has been written about eloquently by Clay Shirky here

And watch for the book. Hyperion has a terrific read for you coming this July.

The Remarkable Ted W. Hall

Today’s Wall Street Journal ran an op ed politely suggesting that the British give up pound sterling and switch to greenbacks. It is the kind of strange idea that is so counterintuitive that you are prepared for satire or possibly a rant by someone still upset about the gold standard. Instead, you get this:

"There is much at stake in the U.K.’s choice. Adoption of the dollar would eliminate exchange rate risk, improving risk-adjusted returns for all asset classes. More venture capital would stay in the U.K. (and flow to it from the U.S.), stemming brain drain and fostering a more innovation-friendly environment in the U.K. The cost disadvantage and illiquidity premium associated with participating in a $40 trillion pool (euro zone plus the U.K.) will be significant compared to participating in a 40% larger $56 trillion pool (U.S. plus the U.K.). This is especially true because the U.S. already has thriving primary and secondary markets in the broadest range of financial instruments, especially longer tenure debt and niche products. The bad news is that both sides of the Atlantic have been nonchalant to date about which way the U.K. goes. The good news is that it isn’t too late.

"Like competition among computer operating systems, very few regimes will emerge as successful. Advantages from absolute scale and increasing returns created as additional participants join will define the winners. In this battle for scale, the U.K. has the enviable position of casting the $8-trillion swing vote. The euro needs it desperately. But for the U.K., the dollar may be more attractive, not least because of regulatory, legal, accounting, cultural and linguistic commonalities. The U.K. will likely find it easier to fashion a coordinated monetary policy with one compatible counterparty than with 15 countries with whom it agrees on wine but not on beef or Iraq.

Meet Ted Hall, master of the provocative, fact-based, global conclusion. Spend a few minutes with Ted and you will realize that he has a broader perspective than you do and you will find yourself wanting to spend a few more minutes with him. He is wicked smart, a hopeless polymath, and has a knack for making money. He is also a mentor, friend, and hero. Read on if you like to hear about highly accomplished people. Otherwise stop now.

• Management consultant. In one of the world’s most demanding professional service partnerships, Ted was the youngest Principal, youngest Director, and one of the youngest Office Managers ever elected at McKinsey & Co. He influenced the careers of hundreds of consultants, affected the course of hundreds more clients. Ted did a great deal to bring microeconomic tools to business strategy, which seems obvious now, but was not obvious at the time he did it. You can see a bit of his business thinking and provocative style here, here, and here. I saw Ted in action many times as a consultant and a couple of times as a client. Expensive - and usually worth it.  
• Rancher. Ted’s Long Meadow Ranch produces award-winning olive oil, beef, and ponies. In a podcast here,
Ted describes his operation.
• Winemaker. Ted began brewing wine in 1971 while at Stanford. He founded Long Meadow Ranch, a successful boutique, organic and environmentally vanguard maker of ultra-premium reds in Napa Valley. LMR, like many other Napa wineries, suffered a setback recently when a fire at a Mare Island storage facility wiped out their stocks, but LMR seems to have recovered.
• Executive. As Chairman of Mondavi Wineries, Ted turned the company around and sold it to Constellation Brands to create the world’s largest wine producer. He made a bucket of money by helping the Mondavi family make several buckets of money.
• Musician and record producer. A trombonist, Ted co-founded and led a 17-piece big band in San Francisco, known as the Midnight Rounds, co-founded the independent jazz record label, Monarch Records, now part of Tambourine, Inc., which Ted now chairs.
• Sailor. Ted has sailed competitively and skippered his own boat to a second place divisional finish in the 1987 Transpac Race from Long Beach to Honolulu. He owns and races a classic 58-foot wooden cutter, Bright Star. He belongs to lots of Yacht Clubs and, if memory serves, even had owned boats.com or something like it back when a URL and a business plan were thought to be roughly the same thing.
• Policy wonk. Ted helped start the McKinsey Global Institute, which has done some very clever economic research that takes advantage of McKinsey’s access to global clients. They produced the best thinking that I am aware of on why productivity varies so much across countries.

Ted Hall: seldom wrong, never in doubt. Gordon Brown may be laughing now, but as Chancellor of the British Exchequer and potential future Prime Minister, he will very likely preside over the sunset of what was once the world's most powerful currency and its first reserve currency. Surely Ted Hall is right that we have a stake in this decision. Indeed, Ted quite likely has a point of view about what the US should be willing to pay the British to dollarize.

But does God LIKE surprises?

Wired founder and gonzo futurist Kevin Kelly on the next 100 years of science:

1) There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years.

2) This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn.

3) Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year. The data volume is growing to such levels of "zillionics" that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix. Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection in the real world.

4) New ways of knowing will emerge. "Wikiscience" is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating "fast, cheap, & out of control." Negative results will have positive value (there is already a "Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine"). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection--- no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)

5) Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.

"Science is the way we surprise God," said Kelly. "That’s what we’re here for." Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.

I have no idea whether deep real-time hypothesis search, wikiscience, new levels of science/knowing/meaning, or surprising God will improve this place or not, but it sounds cool, so sign me up.

Read the whole thing here.

Immigration Reform: La Causa or La Raza?

Why did the leaders of huge demonstrations for immigration reform frequently invoke Cesar Chavez’s birthday this weekend? Chavez is an unlikely icon for open borders and alien amnesty. Few people have sent as many undocumented workers back home to Mexico as Chavez did when he fought for La Causa -- the cause of farmworkers.

Cesar was a great man with many faults. As a foot soldier in the grape and lettuce boycotts, I witnessed a great leader and a terrible manager. He was a brilliant and visionary tactician and a fierce, gentle, committed, leader who earned his place on the calendar and in the hearts of many Americans. But Chavez could not trust people enough to delegate much, so the UFW was never an institution that could last. He hired family -- always a bad sign and forbade the formation of local unions almost unheard of in American labor.

Chavez died in 1993 and few people have had their biographies re-written so quickly. Having devoted his life to La Causa, Chavez is remembered as champion of La Raza. From the time he began organizing farmworkers in th  1950s until the mid 1980s, Cesar was all about the cause of farmworkers. Like every labor leader, he knew that he had more leverage if labor was scarce. When growers would truck illegal immigrants across the border from  Mexico to break UFW strikes, Chavez would call the INS - not unlike the Minutemen do today. Using the INS to try to keep illegals from entering the fields was a key organizing tactic for more than thirty years.

During the sixties and seventies, Latinos, Chicanos, and Hispanics grew in political strength and awareness. These groups frequently and credibly cited abuses from La Migra - the very INS that was helping the UFW build a union. Latino organization brought with it political muscle and in 1975, Governor Jerry Brown signed the landmark ALRA making California the first agricultural state to grant farmworkers the right to organize unions. Farmworker organizing was now to be clean, civil, and highly regulated.

As often happens, institutionalizing the cause killed it. Membership in the UFW began to drop almost immediately. By the mid 1980s, the UFW had fully morphed from La Causa to La Raza and changed its position on immigration, arguing that employer sanctions discriminated against Mexican immigrants. By then however, it was a shadow of the perhaps 80,000 members it had at its peak.

Chavez was not loved by mainstream labor unions. On his death in 1993, the AFL-CIO sent no delegate to his funeral. Because of this, the Clinton Administration obediently boycotted the event. (As Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of Labor, I protested this decision loudly.)

Since his death, Cesar has become a Latino icon and the UFW an organization that is devoted to little more than his memory. According to LA Weekly (in an article that got them sued by a testy UFW):

"Writing in The Nation magazine on the heels of Chavez’s funeral, UFW sympathizer and leftist chronicler Frank Bardacke sharply declared: "[A]t the time of Cesar Chavez’s death, the U.F.W. was not primarily a farmworker organization. It was a fund-raising operation, run out of a deserted tuberculosis sanitarium in the Tehachapi Mountains, far from the field of famous Delano, staffed by members of Cesar’s extended family and using as its political capital Cesar’s legend and the warm memories of millions of aging boycotters."

Well, I know something about aging boycotters (and a bit about FJ Bardacke, one of the few people to both teach at the University of California and put in several seasons of stoop labor in the celery fields. I knew FJ as a committed man of the left and a person of deep conviction and integrity. I’d bet he nailed the UFW story). Evidence can be found in a recent four part series on the UFW by the LA Times that starts here. 

The sad ending: 

"Last year the daily Bakersfield Californian published a devastating multipart investigative series on Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers that portrayed the union as remote from workers, tiny in numbers and a hotbed of Chavez-family nepotism. The series characterized the union founded by Chavez as nowadays just one part of a $150 million group of interlocking nonprofits, including housing, education and property-management agencies, along with a network of nine radio stations - together providing comfortable employment for the heirs of Chavez, who died in 1993, while simultaneously organizing and unionizing a scant few farm workers. 

"The Californian reports also detailed how staff salaries rose six-fold since 1992. And while public contributions, not union dues, were the primary source of revenue for the farm-worker movement, expenditures on administration and staff were far greater than those spent on charitable projects by the UFW and its allied organizations.

At the same time as the union was claiming 27,000 workers (down from its historic high of 80,000 in the mid-’70s), the newspaper could account for only about 5,000 UFW members under contract. 

"If you ask me on the record what I think about the Californian series, I will tell you it’s all a pack of lies," says a veteran farm-worker advocate who still works in alliance with the UFW. "If you ask me off the record, I will tell you it was absolutely on target."

The debate about whether the memory of Cesar Chavez should serve as an icon of an ethnic group or a cause shadows the current immigration debates. Politicians in high dudgeon are followed closely by priests, liberals carrying candles, and conservatives holding pitchforks. As my earlier post noted, I am pessimistic that we will legislate a good solution. Without trying to offer answers to a problem that has few, here are some guidelines: 

• Immigration reform will not keep out terrorists. Sorry. When you hear politicians demagogue the need to "secure our borders", pay them no mind. We probably should have more secure borders, but immigration reform is not about keeping out bad guys who are determined to get in. We should make it tougher on them, but a fully secure border won’t and can’t happen. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

• Immigrants are a solution, not a problem.We know it but we tend to forget it at times like this. You know immigrant families and so do I. Most work incredibly hard, pay taxes, and try to educate their kids. I admire them and wouldn’t choose to trade places with most of them.

• We must have a legally workable immigration process. No country in history has let millions of people pour across its borders without controls. It is not racist to observe this and it’s not anti-immigrant to observe this - which is why legal immigrants are among the strongest proponents of immigration reform.

• Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism -- Pick Any Two. Jim Bennett has some smart thoughts here on immigration and the work of assimilation (update: he has some REALLY good thoughts here). To me, the problem is analogous to ecological carrying capacity -- we have an immigration absorption rate beyond which the radius of social trust starts to shrink. To increase our absorption rate, we need strong democratic institutions and practices along with a fierce commitment to assimilation into a shared set of beliefs and values. These values will evolve and they will often incorporate the traditions of many cultures, but they must be built on a shared core or the center will not hold. Increasing immigration and not creating a shared civic culture is a monumentally bad idea (one promoted implicitly by the La Raza, Mexican flags-waving, neo-Aztlan, take back California boneheads at some of this weekend’s rallies. Brainless puffery does the cause of legal immigration reform no good at all).

Heroes of the written word: David Remnick

The good professor asks: who else do I read with a passion? Although few manage to pass Hitchens as a polemicist, I confess a deep affection for David Remnick who was a fine writer before he became the outstanding editor of the New Yorker. I managed to lure copies of his recent essays from the back alleys of the New Yorker here.

Remnick reminds me of the old but accurate saw about taking the teacher not the course. You can read the writer, regardless of the subject. He spent four years in Moscow writing Lenin’s Tomb, a classic story of how a little glasnost went a very long ways to exposing the economically and morally bankrupt Soviet state. The book won the Pulitzer Prize — and one can easily suppose that it won comfortably.

"The Soviet Union was an old tyrant slouched in the corner with cataracts and gallstones, his muscles gone slack. He wore plastic shoes and a shiny suit that stank of sweat. He hogged all the food and fouled his pants. Mornings, his tongue was coated with the ash-taste of age. ... The state was senile but still dangerous enough."

 

Or this, on the Chernobyl tragedy of April 1986.

Chernobyl symbolized "every curse of the Soviet system, the decay and arrogance, the willful ignorance and self-deception. Chernobyl was not like the Communist system. They were one in the same. ... The system ate into our bones the same way the radiation did, and the powers that be--or the powers that were--did everything they could to cover it all up, to wish it all away.

 

Remnick gets the facts right, the story right, and the words right. He writes to stir the soul. The second Remnick book that I loved was King of the World, a biography of MuhammedAli. Again, the subject doesn’t matter. Remnick loves sports writing, but is not really a fan of boxing, a sport he terms “finally indefensible”. But he adores his subject as a man of his times, a symbol of the 1960s, someone who triumphs as an athlete, a man, and a public figure.

It is hard today to recall the depth of emotion provoked in America by a young, beautiful, loud-mouthed Cassius Clay . American had never seen an athlete who was black, proud, and vocal (“I am the greatest! I shook up the world! I am the greatest thing that ever lived!”). They sure had not seen one who resisited the draft and criticized American foreign policy ("I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong"). And we still haven’t seen one who could convert to the Nation of Islam (which ruined both his marriage and his friendship with Malcom X) and remain a national hero. The book works in part because Remnick paints compelling portraits not only of Ali, but of the sensitive and politically active Floyd Patterson, of the cautious Sugar Ray Robinson, and the evil, almost demented, Sonny Liston. One of the best sports biographies ever written.

Remnick may be my only hero that is younger than me. He is the fifth editor of the venerated New Yorker magazine and heir to one of the most coveted literary positions in America. He has written smart essays and profiles while editing the magazine, with his dispatches from Israel being my favorites. He has made the New Yorker into an even greater literary franchise with events like The New Yorker Festival, the publication of anthologies like this one, this one, or this one (and yes, there are more). Remnick published The Complete New Yorker, a set of DVDs that contain the entire history of the magazine (and should become a subscription website). A real treasure. Finally, he published The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, which you gotta love.

How is the magazine doing under Remnick? Well, since Remnick became editor, New Yorker readership has passed one million. The magazine has won sixteen National Magazine Awards. In 2004, the magazine won three Ellies for Public Interest, Feature Writing, and Essays. In addition Remnick was named Advertising Age’s Editor of the Year in 2000. Not a bad start, considering that he has another 20 years or so to get it right.

Christopher Hitchens, National Treasure

Hitch shoots and scores. Today’s Stone Face of Zarqawi in the Wall Street Journal is Christopher Hitchens at his finest and gives lie to the comforting notion that “the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the fight against al Qaeda”.

Money shot:

“Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."

From where I sit, Christopher Hitchens thinks more critically and writes more eloquently than any journalist today. He is possessed of an intellect honed by the circular firing squads of the partisan left and a bruising Oxford wit that leaves his targets cowering. You will almost surely disagree with Hitchens about something -- and you will take little comfort from the experience.

Hitchens’ recent book Love, Poverty, and War : Journeys and Essays establishes him as our Orwell. He is not only Orwell’s most pointed biographer but he has taken up the Orwellian cudgel as a relentless critic of imperialism, fascism, and communism in any form. His critical style is the most witty, devastating, and literary since, well, Orwell.

Hitchens spares nobody -- not Clinton, not Kissinger, not even Mother Theresa, each the subject of earlier book-length essays. He happily challenges your deepest convictions -- and challenges his own as well. For those new to the cult, Hitch is a former Trotskyite who endorsed Bush in the recent election, a Brit who is a more patriotic American than most Yanks, a student of literature and history who frequently sends professors scurrying back to their notes, and a ferocious debater who humbles enemies left and right.

This book is a treasure of his recent essays -- worth the cover price just for the hysterical and poignant story of his solo trip in a red Corvette along the length of Route 66.

I admit that I could not track every literary allusion or historical reference -- the man has a dramatically better literary and classical education than I do. He frequently delivers a vicious right cross when a jab would knock the target over nicely. But he is informative, provocative, and funny. More than that, I do not ask of a book.

Jam Side Down Award: Percival Lowell..

... who is honored on Google’s homepage today as Google launches, what else: Google Mars. Percival was brother of poet Amy and Harvard President Abbot. [ed: I learned as a kid that "

Boston is home to baked beans and cod,

where Lowells speak only to Cabots and

Cabots speak only to God".

Those Lowells? Yep, those Lowells.

Mr. Lowell was a sensation -- they even named my high school after him. The only problem was, he turned out to be wrong about almost everything — and thus the Jam Side Down award.

He published three books on Mars (here, here, and especially here) describing the Martian canals and extraterrestrials who lived there. He spent the final eight years of his life in an observatory in Arizona trying to find Planet X -- and looking in all the wrong places according to Bill Bryson. After Lowell died, his assistant Clyde Tombaugh finally found Planet X and considered naming it Cronos, Minerva, or Zeus. It was named Pluto (the first two letters in Lowell's honor) by an 11 year old English girl whose great uncle had named the moons of Mars. Now it turns out that Pluto is not a proper planet after all, but a mere "Kuiper Belt object" -- one of many undistinguished bits of rock that ended up too far from home.

They shoulda named it Percy.