Why isn't this book more famous? (Stephen Amidon dept)

I’ve read Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital only now, three years after it came out. My main question is why people hadn’t been telling me about it before. OK, the operational explanation may well be that it got dismissive “not quite up to snuff” handling in the all-powerful NYT. For instance, right near the top of Michiko Kakutani’s “we are not amused” review was: “The novel never lives up to its Dreiseresque ambitions…And those larger aims sometimes clash with the author’s more commercial impulses to write a made-for-the-movies thriller.” Etc.

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Good article: Hillary Clinton was right about health care

There is counter-intuitive, and then there is really counterintuitive: advancing an argument so hard to believe that, well, it’s hard for people to believe you. Congratulations to Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic for pulling off an exercise in the latter category: making the case that Hillary Clinton’s original health care plan, far from being a serious mistake that must be explained away (like, say, an enthusiastic vote in favor of the Iraq war), in fact reflects well on her prescience and judgment.

As Cohn notes, I made a similar case in this magazine twelve years ago. Journalistic insider-style complications abound here, in Anthony Powellish rococo fashion, so let me mention them:

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Fighter planes over Shanghai!

I've spent most of my life in places with lots of airborne activity to notice and watch. I grew up near a major Air Force base. We heard sonic booms every day on the school playground and learned how far to "lead" the sound's origin when looking at the sky, so as to spot the jet traveling much faster than its sound. The base was also a center for B-52 operations. During the Vietnam War years, I'd see news footage of the unmistakable "Stratofortress" silhouette over a jungle and think, Yes, that's just how it looked over our house.

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What Asia needs even more than daylight savings time:

Time zones! At least China does. Many countries in the neighborhood, including Burma, India, Afghanistan, and Iran, have time zones on the half-hour (as does Australia). Nepal has one on the three-quarter hour -- when it's midnight UTC in London, it's 5:45 am in Kathmandu. But China has one great big desert-to-sea time zone covering a country about as big as the United States. As Joshua Rosenzweig points out by email, in response to this post about the curse of sunrise-at-4:30am in Shanghai:

Before you could implement daylight time for China, you'd probably have to implement time zones first. Remember, "Beijing time" stretches from the forests of Manchuria all the way to the bazaars of Kashgar and from the steppes of Mongolia to the tropical Hainan Island.  In fact, if you want daylight savings time you should head out west to Xinjiang, where daylight already lasts well past 9pm all summer long.  Of course, some accommodations are made to adjust to local conditions in places so far west of Beijing, but this is not really the same thing as actual time zones.  But I think to ask Beijing to implement anything that promotes the concept of regionalism is a tall order.

Beer in Shanghai: the experts speak

Oooops yet again: broken links

If you have reached this page via a link from another web site or by clicking on the results of a Google, Technorati, Ask, or any other blog search, my apologies. This isn't what you were looking for.

The transition of incoming links to my previous site -- like the transition of email functions, RSS feeds, archives, etc -- has not exactly gone as planned. Like the other problems, this one will be fixed, but not until after the Memorial Day Weekend. (I'd suggest you use the search box, below, to find the relevant item -- but the archives transferred to and available on this site are still very spotty.) In the meantime, thanks for your interest and patience. Come back next week!
Update: this problem now fixed.

Ooops again: housekeeping matter

Actually, the blog archives from my previous site turn out not to have survived the transition to the Atlantic's new site. This too should be remedied in a few days. Anyhow no one should be reading (or writing) blog material on Memorial Day Weekend. I will be enjoying it in Xiamen, China, looking across the straits to the islands that once were known as Quemoy and Matsu. Happy vacationing to those in the U.S., with appropriate honors and respect to American's fallen servicemen and those who continue to fall.

Old site has moved

As mentioned last month, my previous site, JamesFallows.com, is as of this weekend being re-directed to this address, jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. The archives and links have (we think) been transferred. RSS and similar feeds can't be automatically transferred; if you'd like to sign up, please use the RSS button to the right. Thanks to all for interest and attention. Particular thanks to James Cham, who re-designed and has been running the previous site for the last year; and to the others -- David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera, and Tom Fallows -- who successively helped me with the site before.

What Asia needs (part 926): daylight savings time

When we moved to a rented house in Tokyo in early springtime back in the 1980s, I wondered what the big metal shutters on the windows were for. Typhoons? Riots, because of foreigners in the neighborhood? By the middle of May, I began to see their logic. The days get longer in the summertime here just like they do everywhere else -- but because of where Tokyo sits in its time zone, they mainly get longer in the morning. Through the entire month of June, sunrise in Tokyo occurs before 4:30am -- and in the evening the sun is down by 7. Even with the steel shutters, I usually found myself blasted into consciousness by sunbeams well before 5am, not my chosen time to face the day.

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Why we love the Chinese press

Today’s front-page English-language headlines, from the (state-controlled) China Daily and Shanghai Daily:

Why we love them:

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Email function now repaired / its first harvest is promising

The email button to the right, not working these last three weeks, now is up and running. Previous messages are indeed queued somewhere. I haven't seen them yet but will in a day or two. I hope they all meet the standard set by the first to make its way through the repaired system -- the one quoted after the jump, from Chris Borthwick of Australia, showing that the European roots of "selective enforcement" run far deeper than Captain Renault's last-minute crackdown on gambling in Casablanca:

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The uneven hand of the law (cont.)

My friend Eamonn Fingleton has emphasized that a key to understanding China’s partly controlled, partly out-of-control internal regime is the concept of “selective enforcement.” In principle, a large share of what people do each day violates some rule in some way. In practice, most rules go unenforced, and most people conduct their business without constant hassle from the authorities. The trick is that, whenever they choose, the authorities can start enforcing laws they had previously winked away, and suddenly people are in big trouble for “breaking” 16 different rules no one had cared about before.

This concept is not unique to China or to East Asia — think of Captain Renault’s “shocked, shocked” reaction to the discovery that gambling was going on in Casablanca.

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Oooops! Email function not working

If you used the Email button on the right hand side of the page to send me a message in the three weeks since this site began running, I didn't get it. For general startup-glitch reasons, messages sent to that address have not actually made their way to me, and still don't.

Something similar happened on my own site earlier this year. Maybe the tech gods are sparing me email? In that case, messages simply vanished into the ether. This time, I believe they are queued up somewhere. Eventually I will try to find out what's happened and respond to such messages as still exist. For now, sorry for any invitation I missed (I couldn't have gone anyway, was on the road) or urgent entreaty I seemed just to ignore. The contact function on my old site works fine.

Honoring James Webb, father and son

Via Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, word that his son Jimmy, a Marine lance corporal, has safely returned with his unit from Iraq. This comes one week after the tragic news that Andrew Bacevich, an Army first lieutenant and son of retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, had died there. The senior Webb and Bacevich have of course been realistic, serious-minded opponents of the unrealistic, reckless insistence on invading Iraq.

Reaction to the Webb family news: relief, best wishes, and congratulations, on service and safety.

Reaction to the paired Webb and Bacevich events: wonderment at how rarely we hear of prominent supporters of the war with children or relatives in harm’s way.

Not 100% sure this would be legal in America

Beautiful evening in Bangalore; big schooners of draft Kingfisher beer on the garden-veranda of a luxurious hotel in the center of the city. Evening falls. To perfect the experience and make sure we are not bothered by mosquitoes attracted to the ornamental pond nearby, a helpful touch from the hotel management: our own chemical fogger.

Kingfisher with an overlay of aerosol insecticide -- hard to beat!

O copy editor, where art thou?

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you'll find in books.

For example: during a recent voyage-of-the-damned style long-haul overnight air trip, from Bangalore to Shanghai via Kuala Lumpur, I decided to read a book about aviation.

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Honoring Andrew Bacevich, father and son

To the family of Army 1st Lt. Andrew Bacevich, killed at age 27 this week in Iraq, deepest sympathies. There is nothing others can say to ease this blow, except: we are sorry for the loss of your son, and brother, and nephew — and send you support and sympathies in this time of loss.

From a coldly logical point of view, news of this death is no worse than the steady flow of news of other deaths, American and otherwise, coming out of Iraq. But for many people it is worse, based on the widespread knowledge that Lt. Bacevich’s family includes his father, retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich.

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The first thing you notice when you come to India after China

India and China are so fundamentally different in so many ways that it is amazing that Americans often talk about them as a twinned pair. The Rising Asian Titans, The Billion-Strong Powers, the countries whose people will take our jobs, etc. They’re similar only in the grossest ways - big populations, economies that are rapidly growing, many many citizens who are poor and a few who are very rich.

As for the differences, there are a zillion for later exploration, and one that is stunning the instant you set foot in India (where I have been before, but not recently). The difference is, children

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Burma: Life in the ruins

In the summer of 1988, my wife and I traveled through Burma mainly at night. We rode in the back of an open-bed pickup truck that held, in addition to us, half a dozen 10-gallon jerrycans full of gasoline. This was just after the military crackdown that left large numbers of students, civilians, and even monks dead and that cemented control over the country by the notorious junta later known as “SLORC” – the State Law and Order Restoration Committee. We had made a deal with a moonlighting Army officer to drive us north from Rangoon to Mandalay and Pagan and the upcountry regions. To minimize contact with the authorities, he drove only in the dark; to minimize wear and tear on his truck, he kept the headlights off. Our children, ages 11 and 8, were at a two-week summer camp on an island in Malaysia, where we then lived. When we finally got out of Burma and collected our children, it occurred to us to ask ourselves: What were we thinking???

What we thought about frequently while in Burma was its living-in-ruins effect. Rangoon’s downtown had a surprisingly intact array of stately colonial-era structures – none of them demolished, since there had been essentially no economic activity in the country for 40+ years, but none of them painted, repaired, or maintained in that time either.

Nearly twenty years later, the old buildings are still standing, and a few look better than before. The venerable Somerset Maugham-era Strand Hotel, a frozen-in-time rattletrap when we stayed there, with an ancient dining-hall staff who spoke with English accents and spent evenings watching Heckle & Jeckle cartoons on Burmese TV, is now spiffed-up and elegant. One or two modern office towers have appeared.

But this image suggests what is still the general effect. Shoeless squatters playing soccer in what was some kind of Socialist- architecture compound near the famed Shwedagon Pagoda.

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How the world works: Burma edition

The three things that Burma (Myanmar, to its military regime) has to export are: drugs, gems, and rain forest timber. Most Western countries have applied a range of trade sanctions and import-prohibitions against Burmese goods. China has not and is Burma’s main trade partner.

I don’t know what the drug- or gem-export business looks like, and I’m not likely to get pictures of shipments as they occur. But recently in the port area of Rangoon (Yangon), I got an idea of how the timber trade looks.

Here are supplies waiting for shipment:

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The fired-attorneys case: a truly appalling possibility

Through the controversy over the eight U.S. Attorneys who were fired, I’ve been personally most interested in a potential ninth name on the list, since the ramifications involve the Congressman from Redlands, California, my home town. Details on this at the end of this post.

But there is a new development involving the original eight attorneys that potentially dwarfs in outright evil anything said, suggested, or suspected in the whole saga up till now. Indeed, the implications would be so appalling, if true, that for now I find it hard actually to believe the worst. Here are the facts:

Five and a half years ago, Thomas Wales was murdered in Seattle. He was shot, through the window of his home, as he sat working at his computer late at night. This was Tom Wales:

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Cory Lidle crash: Maybe this will shame the lawyers out of the lawsuit

As mentioned earlier here and here, the Cory Lidle airplane crash last October was a tragedy through and through. The young wives of Lidle and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, no longer have husbands. Very young children may never be able to remember their fathers. My heart goes out to these families for the losses they will always feel.

But as also mentioned earlier, the case compounded tragedy with bitter farce when a lawyer representing the families sued Cirrus Design Corporation of Duluth, Mn., which made the small SR-20 airplane the men were flying, for “wrongful death” in somehow having caused them to crash the plane into a building on the Upper East Side. (Disclosure: I owned and flew the same kind of airplane for six years, until I sold it before moving to China last fall.)

At the time, everything about the lawsuit seemed like ambulance-chasing in the purest and crassest sense.

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My first sandstorm

A few days ago in Shanghai: 5pm. Threatening skies all day, walk out of a building into the kind of gusty wind that, back in Washington, would make me think, A thunderstorm is about to break. It rains hard for a minute, but mainly there’s grit. Suddenly my eyes are full of it, it’s on my teeth and the back of my throat (maybe I should hawwwwwkkk and spit?), I can feel it when I breathe. The sky is a yellowish color I’ve heard about as a pre-tornado warning. Sandstorm! At least a little one, enough to make me wonder about the dreaded blasts from the desert toward Beijing.

The view of the ochreish sky when I got home.

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