the atlantic

The May 2011 issue of The Atlantic featured some short fiction, included pieces by Stephen King and Mary Morris (I had not yet read anything by Morris). Stephen King's piece was great fiction, but is not a happy read (shocker).

The story behind the theme of the May issue actually came from a critique by Stephen King:

Almost four years ago, in The New York Times Book Review, a celebrated writer lamented the decline in the publication of short stories, and with it, a decline in the quality of the short story itself. Too many of the stories that still threaded the needle to publication, he wrote, felt “not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless.” They seemed “show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.”

We found that writer hard to ignore, in part because he kicked us in the teeth. (“No need to check out The Atlantic Monthly; its editors now settle for publishing their own selections of fiction once a year in a special issue and criticizing everyone else’s the rest of the time. Jokes about eunuchs in the bordello come to mind, but I will suppress them.” Thanks!)

We also found him hard to ignore because he was Stephen King, and we thought he knew something about entertaining readers rather than merely furrowing the brows of a writers’ group.

...

King’s short story, for example, originated with a bet he lost to his son Owen over the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The loser had to write a story to fit a title invented by the winner. Stephen King, being Stephen King, set out to write “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” as a funny story set in a mental hospital.

The result is Herman Wouk Is Still Alive. Well written, on a topic few would dare attempt.

Some people voting for Republicans may sometimes pretend they are only interested in the economic conservatism (though they have always talked one way and legislated another) rather than social bigotry commonly advanced, but the reality is that they are married. If you want to vote for Republicans, you cannot deny that you are endorsing essentially a 14th century view of how we should structure society.

I was reminded of this after reading a good article in The Atlantic detailing how Republicans bow to some Iowa jerk-off obsessed with how adults act behind closed doors.

This is why Tim Pawlenty gets runner-up [winner is FCC Chairman Genachowski (and Obama appointee)] for jellyfish invertebrate of the year for shamelessly taking the path of least resistance and losing any conviction he might once have had.

I have long been discouraged by how easy some (Fox News) are able to spread lies and disinformation. How does one counter the rampant disinformation and misinformation in modern America? Obama is a Muslim Socialist from Kenya... Saddam Hussein attacked the US on 9/11... Our taxes have never been higher and we are taxed to death... Scientists are divided over global warming... and so on.

And how do we usually respond to this all-too-common conventional bullshit? By trying to use actual facts and logic as though anyone cares about those things. I think James Fallows, from a recent article in The Atlantic, offers an alternative approach.

“But what if the answer to a false narrative isn’t fact?,” Denton says. “Or Habermas? Maybe the answer to a flawed narrative is a different narrative. You change the story.” Which is what, he said, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have done. They don’t “fact-check” Fox News, or try to rebut it directly, or fight on its own terms. They change the story not by distorting reality—their strength is their reliance on fact—or creating a fictitious narrative, but by presenting the facts in a way that makes them register in a way they hadn’t before.

I'm going to keep this in mind and try to come up with some better narratives.

Is Timothy Geithner, head of the Treasury Department, leading a charge toward socialism, saving the banks, or setting up the next big crisis (or all three and more?)? I don't know. I feel very comfortable weighing on telecom issues, energy issues, and a variety of other policy matters that I have deeply studied. But all this financial stuff is really friggin complicated ... perhaps because the "Greed is Good" generation sent its best minds to Wall Street to make money rather than producing something of value (which can include banking services - but that wasn't what these folks were doing).

So I find it all very frustrating. I'm trying to read up on it - Michael Lewis' The Big Short is on my short list of books to read. As is Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers. What I did just read is Joshua Green's "Inside Man" and I don't quite know what to think of it. I generally find Joshua Green a pretty astute observer, so I wanted to write about it.

I agree entirely with this quote from Geithner:

“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner told me. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson? They’re in direct conflict.”

Nothing that I have read suggests the bank bailouts could have been avoided absent a desire to create a much bigger crisis. But I am deeply disappointed in the Obama Administration's unwillingness to pass good policy into law to limit the size of banks and crack down on shady practices that serve to enrich a few bankers but do nothing to improve the overall efficiency of the economy.

[Simon] Johnson contends that Team Obama has ignored the necessary step of breaking up the power of what he calls the “oligarchies”—the big Wall Street banks—as part of the reform process, which is what happened after the emerging-market crises. “If your banks have run themselves into the ground doing crazy things,” he told me, “you need a substantial shift in the power structure. In the ’90s view, the Geithner-Summers view, it is essential that you address that problem as part of the immediate stabilization policies.” To Johnson, as ardent a believer in regulatory capture as George Stigler ever was, it’s plain that Geithner has fallen under Wall Street’s spell, and that through him and his whole apparat, Obama has too.

I do recommend this article as a decent start in understanding why Obama's Administration has done what it has done. But it seems that we really need Congress to push good policy. Obama doesn't seem up to the task.

James Fallows, one of my favorite writers, penned "How America Can Rise Again" in the Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic. Having recently returned from three years in China, he asks if America is borked (it appears to be) and how we can fix it.

This snippet captures an interesting generational point of view:

“When I was growing up, these bridges and roads and dams were a source of real national pride and achievement,” Stephen Flynn, the president of the Center for National Policy in Washington, who was born in 1960, told me. “My daughter was 6 when the World Trade Center towers went down, 8 when lights went off on the East Coast, 10 when a major U.S. city drowned—I saw things built, and she’s seen them fall apart.” America is supposed to be the permanent country of the New, but a lot of it just looks old.

When I think of the space program, Challenger is more "real" to me than Neil Armstrong's moon walk. That said, anytime I think about these issues, I remind myself that every generation thinks history is coming to an end and things are worse presently than before. We tend to forget that science has kicked Polio's ass as we fixate on the lack of a cure of AIDS or cancer.

Ultimately, we need to wrestle with how many resources we want to put into being the best damn country on the planet. Clearly, we would rather imagine we are awesome at health care than actually be awesome at it. This is also true of broadband, the key utility of the future. To a certain extent, it is childish to focus so keenly on comparing ourselves to international peers - something I think Fallows deals with smartly:

But whatever their popularity or utility in other places at other times, falling-behind concerns seem too common in America now. As I have thought about why overreliance on this device increasingly bothers me, I have realized that it’s because my latest stretch out of the country has left me less and less interested in whether China or some other country is “overtaking” America. The question that matters is not whether America is “falling behind” but instead something like John Winthrop’s original question of whether it is falling short—or even falling apart. This is not the mainstream American position now, so let me explain.

First is the simple reality that one kind of “decline” is inevitable and therefore not worth worrying about. China has about four times as many people as America does. Someday its economy will be larger than ours. Fine! A generation ago, its people produced, on average, about one-sixteenth as much as Americans did; now they produce about one sixth. That change is a huge achievement for China—and a plus rather than a minus for everyone else, because a business-minded China is more benign than a miserable or rebellious one. When the Chinese produce one-quarter as much as Americans per capita, as will happen barring catastrophe, their economy will become the world’s largest. This will be good for them but will not mean “falling behind” for us.

We will do well when others do well. If China falls into turmoil, we will likely suffer more than if China surpasses us in a variety of measures. As long as people want to move here (and we continue encouraging immigration - which is how we continue to get the best scientists in the world), we will be fine.

Though we previously only found the will to invest in science when we were scared shitless of the Soviets, we can choose to invest in science again even without a boogeyman (though we could also justify it because a few Islamic terrorists have returned the right-wing to the bed-wetting tendencies it exhibited during the Cold War). Unfortunately, the larger problem we have is that our political system is failing us. The sound bite society naively believes government must shrink and operate like a business. This naive view totally fails to recognize that government and business have fundamentally different aims and that America thrived when government acted like government and businesses acted like businesses.

Today the economically important technologies include genomic knowledge, information technologies like the Internet, and the geospatial information, from the GPS network, that is built into everything from dashboard navigators to the climate-change-monitoring systems that measure the size of glaciers or extent of forests. Private companies now create the jobs and wealth in each field, but public funds paid for the original scientific breakthroughs and provided early markets.

It couldn’t have been otherwise, Atkinson says. The scale of investment was too vast. The uncertainty of payoff was too great. The risk that profits and benefits would go to competitors who hadn’t made the initial investment was too high. The difference between promising and dead-end technologies was too hard to predict—especially decades ago, when work in all these fields began. So each started as a public program: the Internet by the Pentagon, the Human Genome Project by the National Institutes of Health, and the GPS network by the Air Force, which still operates it. The government could not have created Google, but Google could not have existed without government efforts to establish the Internet long before the company’s founders were born.

Unfortunately, this naive view is vastly overrepresented in both our media and government by loud voices that are amplified by corporations all too happy to foment conflict to maximize their advertising revenues. Add to this our political system, described smartly as thus:

In their book on effective government, William Eggers and John O’Leary quote a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, Michael Keeley, on why the city is out of control. “Think of city government as a big bus,” he told them. “The bus is divided into different sections with different constituencies: labor, the city council, the mayor, interest groups, and contractors. Every seat is equipped with a brake, so lots of people can stop the bus anytime. The problem is that this makes the bus undrivable.”

What do we do about it? We need to fight for inches. To use a football metaphor, our history focuses on improbably massive touchdown runs and successful hail-mary passes. But that is a disservice to how change happens. Change happens in the inches (as my friend Jim Baller, recently reminded me) - as noted by Al Pacino:

So we need to educate ourself, our friends, and our neighbors. We need to organize. We need to win an inch.

As I continue to plow through the magazines I set aside during my sports shooting season, I wanted to note the 2009 October issue of The Atantic. It focused mostly on media issues, but also featured one of the best discussions of U.S. Torture Policy in Andrew Sullivan's letter to former-President Bush that offers perhaps the only real solution for moving forward on this important issue.

I was struck by a quote from Mark Bowden (an author I almost always enjoy reading, regardless of subject matter) in his "The Story Behind the Story" that really gets to the heart of why Fox News bothers me so much:

Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful because it does not seek power. It seeks truth.

Fox News has blazed a path of subverting what journalism should be. They weren't the first - but they have blown away the competition. And it bothers me to the extent that other networks copy that approach in an attempt to gain viewers rather than educate viewers.

I was pleasantly surprised by Robert D. Kaplan's "Why I Love Al Jazeera," (which was about Al Jazeera English, not the arabic sister-channel). AJE is basically a BBC-style program if Howard Zinn ran it - it focuses intently on the perspective of the powerless.

And Kaplan also zinged Fox News - noting:

I have spent the past two years reporting from the Indian Ocean region, dealing predominantly with Muslims and indigenous nongovernmental organizations; watching Al Jazeera is the vicarious equivalent of engaging in the kinds of conversations I have been having. One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others. Watching Fox, you have to wonder whether many of its commentators have ever had a conversation with a real live Muslim abroad.

I enjoy watching sports on TV. I suspect that most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about all of what goes into televising a sporting event. Having been on the ground, shooting at major events, I have some respect for all the folks that make it possible. But there is a whole lot of work that I don't see - what goes on in the production truck.

If you ever wonder what goes on in that truck, you should read "The Hardest Job in Football" from The Atlantic.

Most of the people who witnessed this seesaw battle were watching on CBS. The capacity crowd in Giants Stadium was 79,276 that afternoon, but was less than 1 percent of the game’s total audience. More than any other professional sport, football is primarily a television show. Many die-hard fans have never even attended a contest in person. For them, a football game is something that unfolds on their screen in a smooth and familiar way, so commonplace that few give it a second thought. The broadcast arrives in their living room, packaged in stereo sound and in full-color high-definition, shown from constantly shifting angles, from stadium-embracing wide shots to intimate close-ups, all of it smoothly orchestrated and narrated, and delivered up as though from the all-seeing eye of the supreme NFL fan, God Almighty.