Fun with datelines from the NYT (updated)

(Update below) Traveling during the Barack-Hillary debate, so no thoughts on that until I see a replay. But this passage from today's NYT, perused during an endless session on US Air, certainly caught my eye:

REDLANDS, Calif. — The most trenchant symbol of the California presidential primary can be found on an isolated stretch of Interstate 15, smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. There, affixed to an old trailer, is possibly the largest candidate billboard in the entire state, and it is for the Republican fringe candidate, Ron Paul.

Why did I notice?

1) Redlands is where I grew up and where my dad still lives, and it doesn't get that much national ink. So, great!

2) Redlands is not "smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert." To put this in terms that might resonate with the NYT copy desk, this would be like saying: White Plains is smack in the middle of the Adirondacks. More or less in the same part of the country? Yes. In the middle of? Not hardly.

3) Interstate 10 passes through Redlands. Interstate 15? Unt-uh -- at its closest point 15 or 20 miles away.

Maybe the writer was talking about some other place? Fine. But (not that I want to look a hometown gifthorse in the mouth), why this dateline?

On to weighter matters another time.

Update: Fellow son-of-Redlands Brian Beutler observed the same phenomenon on his blog.

Seriously, wasn't sloppiness about datelines one of the complaints about the NYT during the wild and woolly days of Howell Raines? I'm sure what happened in this case was the following: the Ron Paul sign in question was probably someplace on I-15 en route to Barstow, which is in the middle of the Mojave Desert and which is the heartland of Paul-type libertarian/survivalist sentiment. And for the Times's purposes, it was no doubt all close enough to fit under a 40-miles-away dateline. On the other hand: Bill Keller, the NYT's editor, went to college right in this same area and presumably would have known better if he had seen the story. That's all on this subject.

The State of the Union, now with Gouverneur Morris!

For the fifth exciting year in a row, line-by-line commentary on President Bush's State of the Union speech here. Previous installments:
2004
2005
2006
2007

Last year, Dikembe Mutumbo. This year, Gouverneur Morris! All the details, including why this speech ended with the three most dreaded words in presidential rhetoric, here.

All Things Considered interview with Robert Siegel

From yesterday's (Jan 29) All Things Considered, my interview with Robert Siegel about China's vast dollar holdings here. Original story here -- free! like all our content! -- and update here.

Bill Clinton on getting involved in the primaries, ca. 2002

In the fall of 2002 I flew from Washington to Little Rock and then Fayetteville, Arkansas -- in my own little propeller airplane, it was a blast -- to spend time interviewing Bill Clinton. He was just settling into his post-presidential life. Raising funds for his foundation (now a source of controversy on its own, then still a goal). Laying out plans for his presidential library, then still under construction. Working on his book -- already behind schedule, but of course it turned out well. And theorizing about how, as a young and vigorous former two-term president, he should deal with the next crop of Democratic candidates then on the rise.

Ah, if only he'd listened to his own advice five-plus years later. Sample: "Look," he told me back then. "I can't run." As I said in the article, "In his tone he reminded me again of a champion athlete whose career had come to an unnaturally early end."

"If somebody needs me to go do something [for the party], and nobody else can do it, I'll go do it." He pointed out that he had appeared at more than a hundred fundraising events for the party and its candidates in 2002. 'I'd like for my direct political involvement to go way down ..."

Continue reading "Bill Clinton on getting involved in the primaries, ca. 2002" »

Man from Mars perspective on the Republican debate

As soon as this evening's Florida debate ended, the MSNBC TV commentators were wondering how it would have looked to "someone who was seeing these candidates for the first time."

Why didn't they just ask me?

This is the first debate among the Republicans that I've seen at full length and in real time.* So factoring in all the expectations I'd gathered from coverage (Romney too weaselly, McCain really the strongest one, Huckabee a charmer, etc), how did it look?

Romney by a mile. More precisely, the only candidate you could imagine putting up a plausible general-election fight. Again, I'm not handicapping the GOP race, which I know nothing about. I'm not saying how each candidate did relative to previous appearances. I am telling you how this one debate looked if you had never seen these guys on the same stage before.

McCain, Giuliani, and Huckabee all notably ill at ease when asked to say anything about the economy. (Huckabee: building two new lanes on I-95, Maine to Florida, as an energy saving measure???) When Romney asked Giuliani a specific question about how to deal with China, the answer reminded me of the way I would sound if asked to fill 90 seconds discussing my favorite fashion designers. McCain attempting to describe his economy policy by listing his advisors. (Jack Kemp?) The more the economy matters as The general election issue, the less this will cut it -- and the more Romney can use at least the veneer of his being able to discuss the issue.

Two other random points:
- Boy, do these people hate Hillary Clinton! Her name was mentioned at least ten times as often as George Bush's (and all Bush mentions, that I heard, were from Romney).

- The intrusiveness and badgering nature of Tim Russert's questions! I wonder whether the two parties will subject themselves to another presidential cycle of "debating" on these demeaning terms.

Here endeth the report from outer space.

___
* (Amazingly enough, they're not carried on TV in China. Real-time webcasts are not that easy to find, and the connections are too slow any way.)

The stupidest thing I've done (twice) in China; a stupid thing I didn't do in the US

Twice during my first year in China I did something so obtuse I can hardly stand to think back on it. In each case I was so mad at the bus or taxi that had come within one millimeter of running me down -- while I was in a crosswalk with a green light and it was roaring at full speed straight ahead through a red light -- that I slapped its fender as it went by. I didn't even have to move my arm to reach it, since it was right there.

In many American cities, perfectly normal! I've seen road-raged pedestrians or bicyclists in San Francisco and New York yell at and pound the hoods of cars they judged to be cutting it too close.

But in China -- not such a good idea! The screech of brakes and squeal of tires. (Hmm, if the brakes work so well, why couldn't they have been applied before the red light?) Door flung open. Multi-lingual festival of curses and gestures. Contorted face of rage on the Chinese driver's side. And my chagrined realization that I had for no good reason made somebody very angry at me and, by extension, the outside world of laowai (老外, foreigners). Even though the bastard did almost just kill me.

Of course now I realize my error.

Continue reading "The stupidest thing I've done (twice) in China; a stupid thing I didn't do in the US" »

Why is your flight so late? Another excellent explanation

Previously I mentioned this column by Salon's "Ask the Pilot" writer Patrick Smith, which laid out the fundamental reasons U.S. airline flights run into so many "unexpected" delays.

Here is another clear, logical, and authoritative explanation of the obstacles that simply aren't going to be removed by any of the frequently-discussed "solutions" to airline congestion. (Including the totally bogus idea that "opening up" military airspace would make any difference.) What would make a difference? Well, you'll have to read it for yourself and see.

This latest account comes from Don Brown, long-time air traffic controller who now writes his "Get the Flick" blog about aviation. It's long, but it's clear and interesting. Here's a hint about its point: if a runway can handle at most 60 planes an hour, and the airlines schedule 70 for that same hour, the planes will be late.

Airlines can make more money selling 70 airplanes worth of tickets per hour than they could if they limited themselves to the 60 airplanes per hour that the runway can handle. In fairness to the airlines, it’s not in their interest to limit themselves. It is easier to sell the tickets and blame the delays on the weather or the “antiquated” air traffic control system. Especially if the flying public doesn’t understand runway capacity limits and therefore fails to notice that the “antiquated” air traffic control system is delivering more airplanes to the runways than the runways can handle.

More here.

Why I won't end up voting for Ron Paul (updated!)

The Daily Paul has a ringing new endorsement, based on.... the (cliched+ignoramus) boiled-frog principle!!!

I've heard more and more people on the forums wondering why the average Joe out there just ~doesn't get it~. Here is an analogy that I use when talking to people to get the point across... it's odd, but it works.

Take a frog and throw it into a pot of boiling water. It'll jump out as quickly as possible! Take the same frog, put it in a pot of cold water, and heat it up slowly... it will sit in the water until it dies. (I've not had the heart to bench test this theory, I'm just going with what I was told.)

Close readers will recall that Hillary Clinton also went in for boiled-frog balderdash before her defeat in Iowa. As far as I can tell, she's steered clear ever since -- and look at the results! Maybe this is what people mean when they say the Clintons will do whatever it takes to win. If only the Paul team had her discipline....

(Thanks to Dylan Matthews. And note to any sincere Ron Paul supporters who come across this item: I actually have a lot of sympathy and admiration for his role in this campaign. This is less about him than about my ongoing lament over the moron-ization of American political rhetoric. Update! Judging from recent entries in my email inbox, I guess I need to make something a little bit clearer. This post is not really about Ron Paul. It is a what we English-speakers refer to as a "tongue in cheek" reference to a bit of political bombast I am determined to shame people out of using: the inaccurate "boiled frog" story. Sometimes the term used is, "a little joke." No offense meant to Paul-dom!)

The best thing I didn't see on Fox News Channel

Back in the U.S., channel surfing in the hotel room at 3am because of the 13-hour Beijing-DC time difference, come across something I am denied/spared in China: the Fox News Channel!

Most of it, same as always, except for a little more Botox, trout lips, and related burnishings for the female news people. But there's something missing..... What is it that my eye is accustomed to but doesn't see????

Maybe... the logo of the waving American flag? It used to be so prominent, but now it seems to reappear only as a tiny underline beneath the occasional label saying Live or Fox in the northwest corner of the screen.

But no, there's something else that I'm not seeing. ... And -- now I've got it! There's no longer any "terrorism threat level" warning included in the crawl!!

The current threat level could be orange, it could be yellow, it could be "elevated," it could be "extreme" -- and FNC viewers would not be reminded of that fact every five seconds, as they had been for years.

I don't often look to Fox News for indications of sanity and perspective in our public life, but this one counts.

I won't stop to re-argue the case that 'fraidy-cat-ization of America was one of the most damaging long-term effects of 9/11. (For more, see below.*) And I realize that if this mood has passed, it's less because of a sober reassessment of the importance of stoicism than because of some crude Law of the Conservation of Fear. The more people are terrified about economic meltdown, the less they have time to be terrified about anything else.

Here's the reason I raise the topic. Even if the age of American fearfulness is ending -- not potential threats to America, but America's fearful response -- a bellicose nervous-nellyism is now a major part of our identity in the eyes of the world.

Once again, I take my evidence from pop fiction, this time from a best-seller in India:

Continue reading "The best thing I didn't see on Fox News Channel" »

Land of Plenty

I've had this reaction on each of my previous return trips to America over the last 18 months: the abundance! The affluence! The choice!

I walked into a high-end Whole Foods grocery store in Washington this morning -- and after a few minutes, had to walk out again.

The burnished fruits and vegetables. The forty varieties of bread. The souvenir-looking cuts of meat. The wines and cheeses. (The beers!!) Emotionally it was too much.I realized that my wife and I spend a significant amount of time each day in China thinking about how to get stuff -- food, clothes, supplies. I know that America is on the verge of disastrous recession and that China is dynamic power of tomorrow, etc etc. But, my lord, life can be good here. (And where are the men pulling carts full of coal or scrap paper down the street, as if they were human beasts of burden?)

By tomorrow I won't notice any more.

Mitch Kapor on spreadsheets, Magellan, etc

Yesterday, a NYT tech column suggested that Mitch Kapor of Lotus was responsible for the fundamental innovation of the spreadsheet.

Today I said, quoting Dottie Hall, that actually Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston had invented the spreadsheet, with VisiCalc for the Apple II -- but Kapor had brought it to the PC world with Lotus 1-2-3.

Kapor writes to say that's wrong too!

As long as we're beating a dead frog, let me add my two Linden dollars*: Bill Gross was responsible for Lotus Magellan, not me. I had nothing to do with it.

Also, "and while he (me, that is) can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC," is not true either. Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.

As for Bill Gross: I've written a whole string of articles lauding him for the programs he has created. The only one of these articles I can find online right now is this. from my own days as a NYT tech columnist.** Gross was also the force behind a program I have praised so often I should be on its payroll, X1. (To spell it out: I'm not, and I paid for my copy of X1.) I had assumed that as Kapor was institutionally responsible for Lotus Magellan, but he should know.

And as for spreadsheet genealogy, I have already received so many accounts of how this happened that I have decided to quote only Kapor's for the moment, since the rest have so many variations on points large and small.

____
* For those embarrassed to ask: Linden dollars are the currency of Second Life.

** Back in my day as NYT tech columnist, the paper ran a correction when I made a mistake. I'm just saying.....

For the record, two (interesting!) boiled-frog updates

Both referring to yesterday's shock-horror revelation that the NYT, Oxford Univ, and a skilled tech writer had combined to repeat a cruel bit of misinformation.

1) My friend Dottie Hall, a veteran of Microsoft, Symantec, Eclipse Aviation, and other ventures, points out in her blog that the boiled frog story was not the only canard in the NYT article. The column, by G. Paschal Zachary, also said this:

Businesses crave a sweet spot: where the line is drawn in favor of the innovator. The late Akio Morita, founder of Sony, talked about satisfying appetites that people didn’t even know they had. He achieved such a feat with the Sony Walkman, the music player introduced in 1979. While at the Lotus Development Corporation, [Mitch] Kapor created another such “killer app,” or application: the spreadsheet for the PC.

Mitch Kapor is a wonderful guy, creator of such truly innovative programs as Agenda and Magellan during his years at Lotus and in recent years hard at work on the innovative Chandler project. And while he can be credited with introducing the spreadsheet for the PC, namely Lotus 1-2-3, that was less a break through than the real innovation of creating the spreadsheet itself. All honor for this latter achievement lies (as Dottie Hall points out) with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented VisiCalc for the Apple II.

2) Reader Gregory Sokoloff points out a version of the boiled-frog story that, if we called it boiled-salaryman, might actually be true. He lived in Japan when I did, in the late 1980s, and reports:

You may remember that the most common form of bath in homes was of a design not found in the West. The bath would first be filled with cold water, then a natural gas heater would be lit and the water would slowly circulate from the bath into the heater and then back into the bath, much like a heated swimming pool. The recirculation was achieved simply through convection without any pump, and thus the device was very, very quiet. Apparently, people commonly would get into their baths when the water was tepid, fall asleep, and then wake up with serious burns requiring treatment in a hospital. I don't know if there were deaths. Of course, only one who has lived in Japan can fully appreciate how sleepy and inebriated many Japanese are by the time they take a bath after rounds in the local bars (the best named one where I lived was the "Salaryman Daigaku" ["Salaryman University"]).

I may be repeating an urban myth here, but a good friend of mine their swore she witnessed the aftermath of such an incident.

So, consistent with my emphasis on the scientific approach to tall tales, I hereby request that henceforth people begin the cliched story thus: "Throw a salaryman into a boiling hot bath, and he'll scramble right out. But put a salaryman in a nice comfy tub, and....."

You really do learn something by reading the paper

And what I learned from today's New York Times is that tomorrow the Atlantic will remove the firewall that for years has applied to most articles in the print magazine and our very extensive archives.

Hmmm! The Atlantic, believe it or not, has been a serial innovator and pioneer in the web area. Back in the dimly-remembered mid-1990s it was one of the first non-tech magazines even to have a web site and to put much of its content online free. A few years ago it changed to the firewall / subscribers only model. Now, with the centrality of the web to the kinds of discussions we hope to provoke, this latest change, which should certainly continue the expansion of the site's influence and audience.

It will also do something that I think will be of even greater long-term importance:

The Atlantic Monthly, as we have pointed out oh, once or twice in the last while, is now 150 years old. In fact, working toward 151.

There is a phenomenal amount of fascinating and historically important material in our archives from those 150+ years. Not all of it is available online. (If you have seen the bookcases full of back volumes, you know what a gigantic challenge the mere scanning and OCR-ing will be.) Some of the highlights have been collected by Robert Vare and Daniel Smith in their superb recent 150th Anniversary anthology.

But a lot of unexplored material is available, and searchable, in the archives, and this will be an important journalistic, academic, and historic resource. Once again, a new era begins.

(I no longer have to say, "Subscribers Only" about some articles. Still -- subscribe! The timeless story of media-and-technology is that as new "delivery vehicles" arrive, they create additional forms of receiving information; eliminate a few old forms, like the cuneiform tablet; but mainly expand the range of choices people have by leaving most old forms in place. Despite television, we still have radio; despite radio and television and the internet, we still have books; despite email we still have phone calls; and for quite a while despite the internet we will still have something physically like a book or magazine, just because there are so many times and places where it's the best way to see what you want to look at. Eg: On my latest 13-hour plane flight, some of passengers mainly used laptops or iPods. Virtually all had some kind of book or magazine. Magazine content, words and pictures alike, looks far far better in real magazines -- though the web version is indispensable.)

In any case, another new beginning as of tomorrow.

Stop the boiled frog madness, part 612 (NYT repeat-offender dept)

G. Paschal Zachary is a very good writer. The New York Times is a very good newspaper. Oxford U. is a very good university, and its comparatively-new Said Business School is presumably OK. But these worthies have joined forces to produce the latest high-profile example of boiled-frog idiocy.

From Zachary's tech column today, on the riskiness of innovation:

IPod “addiction” seems benign. Yet some worry that other innovations may harbor health threats. As a result, they may be vulnerable to what Marc Ventresca, a lecturer at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, calls the “frog boiling” problem. For the frog, gradually rising heat causes no alarm — until the water is so hot that death is imminent.

The boiled-frog metaphor seems benign. Yet some worry that it reveals not merely weakness for cliche but also amazing gullibility on the scientific front.

The real culprit here, of course, is the Said Business School professor. Although why Zachary would feel he had to attribute a bromide to an "authority" is interesting in itself. ("The predicament comes down to what Ludwig Wittgenstein, of Trinity College, Cambridge, called 'six of one, half-dozen of the other.' ") But the NYT falls into this trap again and again. It is time for the newspaper of record to get the record right!

(Thanks to Steve Corneliussen for early alert on this threat.)

Another very good book: 'China Road'

I am remiss in not having said anything earlier about China Road, by NPR's long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford, which came out last summer.

The book has been widely and deservedly praised for its structure: a narrative of a trip along China's Route 312, a kind of Route-66 counterpart, which runs from Shanghai to the far northwestern Silk Road outpost of the country. Gifford knows the language, obviously enjoys the people, and has a good eye and ear. I have now been to most of the places Gifford describes, and reading his account of them both reminded me of what I'd seen and told me something new.

Gifford's obvious and undeniable love for China and average Chinese people allows him to pepper nearly every page of the book with tart, even harsh observations -- confident that they'll be seen in context of his overall affection for the place. (By analogy: I love America, but I've got a million complaints about my modern America. Although Gifford is obviously not Chinese, something similar it true between him and China.) I'll mention only two here, though there are many I'm tempted to quote.

First, a a small (and accurate) jab at prissy Westerners, which is on my mind as I pack for a quick trip to the U.S. Then after the jump, a jab more directly at China, which also corresponds to what I've seen. For the rest, get the book!

About Westerners:

The DVD is playing several hundred decibels above the level permitted in heavy industrial factories in the United States, though at first I don't realize this. It's only when the child in the seat behind leans over the back of the seat next to me and starts singing that I realize how, over time, I have become inoculated against Chinese noise... China does that do you. You go back to the United States or Europe , and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)

Continue reading "Another very good book: 'China Road'" »

Nagl, Russert, and crises of institutional culture

Two very important articles:

1) Tom Ricks's story in the Washington Post revealing that Lt.Col John Nagl is leaving the Army to join a new DC think tank.

I am partial to Nagl, whom I know somewhat and like very much, and whom I interviewed, along with Lewis Sorley and Conrad Crane, two years ago on the Charlie Rose show. Indeed many reporters know and like him, and he has been a kind of media darling: subject of a (very good) cover-story profile by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine four years ago; author of a well-received book about the timeliest of military topics, counter-insurgency strategy; and one of the driving forces behind the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," the same document whose existence is so often cited as one of general David Petraeus's great accomplishments. (Petraeus and Marine Corps general James Mattis sponsored the overall effort.) Nagl had been a Rhodes scholar and, like Petraeus (Princeton PhD) before him, has been a very prominent example of the media-savvy scholar-warrior.

Continue reading "Nagl, Russert, and crises of institutional culture" »

We're No Longer Number One?

One of many memorable columns by the Atlantic's former editor, the late Michael Kelly, came after he'd spent a wonderful summer spell at Cape May with his family, and it began this way: "I have been for some days at the shore, in the company of many of my fellow middle-aged Americans who are wearing not a lot of clothes, and I have a report. My fellow middle-aged Americans, we are some kind of fat."

I don't mean we are getting a bit thick around the middle, or that we are pleasantly plump, or that we are zaftig, or Rubenesque (we are Reuben-esque), or settling into our bodies. I mean we are fat, fat, fat. It's true: As a people, we have never been this fat. Probably, no people has ever been this fat. We are billowing immensities of avoirdupois, great, soft bins of finest quality lard, a nation of wide loads wallowing down the highway of life.

Americans are indeed the proud world champions of fatness. But here as in so many areas we may soon be pushed from the throne.

At least that's what I thought after a few days at a Chinese beach resort where virtually all the other foreign visitors were Russians. For sure in the men's division, they're giving us a run for the money.

Perhaps the group at the resort was unrepresentative of its home population (rich enough to travel -- and eat everything they want?). And perhaps they unfairly seem bigger than they are because, unlike Americans of similar stature, they prefer Speedos. But the three shown here (two more after the jump) are a fair sample of the travelers we saw. OK, the first one was larger than normal - but the other two were on the svelte side and, from their faces, appeared to be no older than about 35.

Clean your plates, America! There are hungry middle aged men in Russia who wish they had that food.

Continue reading "We're No Longer Number One?" »

I maintain statesmanlike silence; the readers speak!

... about Mac, Vista, hibernation, and so on. Ongoing commentary on previous discussion after the jump.

Continue reading "I maintain statesmanlike silence; the readers speak!" »

More on mass-produced fine art from China

If you're interested in seeing more about the Chinese "art factory" village of Dafen, previously described and depicted here and here, it is worth checking out this site from the German photographer Michael Wolf.

The main site brings up a collection of several dozen tiny thumbnails, which can be clicked individually to view. Each is a shot of an artist with one of his or her creations -- for instance, several versions of the Mona Lisa. They are slow to load, at least for me in China, but worth the wait -- as are many of Wolf's other portfolios available on his site.

Since I can't directly include one of Wolf's professional shots, here is one more snapshot from my own visit to Dafen.The point to notice is the... breadth of the genres represented.

The $1.53 Trillion Question

The perils of even a modest lead-time: when my article in the latest Atlantic about China's holdings of foreign assets went to press, the best and safest estimate we could find of the size of these holdings was $1.4 trillion. Thus the title: "The $1.4 Trillion Question."

This weekend the People's Bank of China, China's equivalent of the Federal Reserve, announced that the holdings had now reached $1.53 trillion. They went up by more than $460 billion in 2007, and they're still rising by more than $1 billion per day.

In any case, the forces explained in that article still apply -- and maybe we'll have to update the title for the web version of the piece (which is free, outside the normal firewall), to reflect the mounting total month by month. By the end of the year: "The Almost-$2 Trillion Question"? Which would mean that, on average, each American would not have borrowed about $4,000 from China; the figure would be closing in on $6,000.

Passage from the original, days-of-innocence article:

This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus-$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day-that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

Now this is just taunting, part 2

Since I am no longer whining about software and hardware, and no longer spending my time asking "What is that godawful smell???" in my Beijing apartment, I am free to return to a familiar source of complaint: my cold-turkey withdrawal from something that once consumed a lot of my time, namely watching live sports on TV.

Imagine my surprise when I switch on the TV a few hours ago, Sunday night China time, and see -- a NFL playoff game! And one involving my "hometown" team, the Redskins! (My boyhood hometown team, the LA Rams, is of course lost to history.) But wait a minute... They're playing in Seattle. And as I turn it on, the Redskins have just stormed from behind to take a 14-13 lead! And, the Seahawks mishandle the ensuing kickoff return, so that the Redskins get the ball deep in Seahawks' territory, with a lead, in the fourth quarter. Huzzah!

As anyone still reading knows, what followed, from the game actually played one week ago, was about the most disspiriting ten minutes in any franchise's history. Moral question: with full foreknowledge of what's ahead, do I leave the TV on to watch those ten minutes?

Would Red Sox fans keep watching if they happened upon a replay of the 1986 World Series? Would Yankees fans, if they found a broadcast of the 2004 AL playoffs? If they were in China, maybe they would. And I did.

(Previously in the taunting series, here.)

Special one-time offer: Comments! Vista! Mac!

As promised, I am giving a rest to the whole question of Vista, the Mac, hibernation, blue-screen crashes, etc. We're phenomenally fortunate to have today's computers at all -- I remember the days of the TELEX machine and the suitcase-sized Compaqs and Kaypros -- and I forswear further whining. And to think back to the days before most software had "auto-save" or "recovery" features. Brrrrrr!

Unfortunately a lot of interesting e-mail arrived only after that promise kicked in. So after the jump, a few of the interesting addenda and responses. Anyone who would like to pursue the issue is invited to do so via Comments, enabled for this post only.* Anyone who is bored by this entire topic -- Sorry!

*Update: Never mind! The Movable Type editing screen I am looking at has the box for "Accept Comments" clicked Yes. But the actual post shows no Comments line. Oh well. The e-mails below are still interesting, and they will have to suffice.

Continue reading "Special one-time offer: Comments! Vista! Mac!" »

Let's let Bill Gates have the last word about Windows Vista

... as he did, in this widely-circulated but still fascinating and completely winning video clip.

I agree with my Atlantic colleague Ms. McArdle that computer operating systems should be a matter of practicality rather than ideology. (Although I prefer to think of myself as a pantheist, rather than an agnostic like her.) I've always had both Mac and Windows systems and have continually tried out others. It's a question of where your "real" work gets done, and that's what I'm reexamining to see how much of a PITA it would be to change..

And in response to one of many very interesting emails....

I noticed that both you and your friend both experienced long resume times from hibernate. There's good reason for that, which is that it has to read your complete memory state from disk. This is a very slow process, which is limited by hardware. I was wondering -- why don't you just use sleep/standby? My Thinkpad wakes up in about 1 second and is completely responsive. I always hear people complain about hibernate, but my thought is always -- why use it then?

I say: you're right. The Vista "sleep" command actually works very well. But it draws a little bit of current, and when you're really hoarding power or shutting down for a long time, "hibernation," which draws no current, would seem the better choice. EXCEPT for the very slow recovery time. In part that's is because a system like mine has to read 2GB worth of memory-state from the hard disk. But it's also ... something else, since even after the computer appears to have regained its previous state it takes an inexplicably long time before it will respond to any commands.

Oh well. As Bill Gates says above, Ask me after Microsoft has put out its next version of Windows. Until then, as with the Beijing air, I'll give this subject a rest!

A little less coyness on Mac-vs-Vista

As mentioned recently, ongoing struggles with Windows Vista, here in our Vista/XP/XP/Mac iBook two-person, four-laptop household, have led to me consider all alternatives. Now, the rest of the story:

Soberingly enough, I have used personal computers longer than several of my fellow Atlantic "Voices" have been alive. I got -- really, built -- my first computer in 1978. (Taste of days gone by: "The SOL-20 was probably the first PC to incorprate a keyboard and video with the machine.") It used an Intel 8080 chip, and as the Intel-PC-Windows paradigm has emerged, I've stuck to that course.

Through those years, I've considered switching tracks to the Mac world three times.

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No political content! #1: Back to the Mac?

The message below is from my "friend" -- never met him, but corresponded for years -- Kenneth Rhee of Northern Kentucky University. We made contact long ago via a support forum for the nonpareil info-handling program Zoot*. Zoot is Windows-only, so Rhee, like me, has done his main work on PCs.

Recently he made The Change -- after wrestling with a new ThinkPad that came with Windows Vista pre-installed. This week Rhee submitted the following report on the the Zoot forum, plus some passages from a followup email to me:

I switched over to the Mac last year after getting a bit frustrated with Vista (I still run Vista in my Thinkpad on a rare occasion if I want to get "frustrated-little joke here but it seems to happen every time I use it these days).

My experience goes something like this. I wanted to use a few Mac programs and bought a MacBook thinking that I'll probably use it 10-15% of my time. After a month, I noticed that I was using my Mac 85-90% of the time, and having more fun using it rather than getting more frustrated fixing things or waiting for things to happen. So, I switched over completely and bought a new MacBook Pro with Leopard to replace my Thinkpad and haven't looked back.

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This is why they call me an optimist

I have decided to be happy that a waste-gas line in our apartment building in Beijing is no longer (as of two days ago) feeding into our own apartment's ventilation ducts. Rather than making myself.... less happy through dwelling on what we have been breathing and living in these last two months.

I think this is part of my ongoing acclimatization process: learning to look on the bright side. Mind over miasma!

For another day: observations on the uneven levels of fit-and-finish in a country that is developing and modernizing, as opposed to developed and modern.

On the actual, you know, "issues" the next President will face

Enough of this campaign hubbub! Whoever is left standing to be sworn in 377 days from now will suddenly have to worry about things like.... the Chinese government's enormous hoard of U.S. dollar assets.

My attempt to explain how exactly that pile of money was stacked up, and what the Chinese government has in mind for it, in this article from the Atlantic's new January-February issue. If you been yearning to know how the dollar you spend at Wal-Mart or CVS is eventually reincarnated as a Chinese-held Treasury note, or why Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone is about the most reviled foreigner in China at the moment, your dreams have come true.

Unlike most previous such announcements, I don't have to say "Subscribers Only" for this one. It's in the free section of our site. Nonetheless, as always, Subscribe! Among other reasons, you'll get to see the wonderful full-sized version of the wonderful Guy Billout's illustration for the piece, reproduced in miniature online and below.

New Hampshire, from Beijing

1) From a distance, it is no surprise that Hillary Clinton apparently got a big boost from women voters. It's more surprising (if this is what the results end up showing) that she didn't have a larger margin among women who made up their minds in the last few days. She really was ganged-up on after Iowa, in a way that should have brought out the chivalry --rather, the decency -- in at least some men and the solidarity in many women. Also, if "the media" largely doing the ganging-up had been one of the candidates on the ballot, I suspect its popularity would have been below Tom Tancredo's.

2) As Andrew Sullivan immediately noted, John Edwards really did give the very same post-vote speech this week that he did last week in Iowa. Weird. Same real-world anecdotes he had delivered in a thousand living rooms in Iowa and New Hampshire and that he used on TV five days ago. Same apparent lack of recognition that this was one of his scarce opportunities to reach tens of millions of people live and unfiltered. Main difference: the (inaccurate) claim that last week he had congratulated Barack Obama on his win and this week he was congratulating Hillary Clinton. He quite notably did not mention Obama last week.

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A fact to understand about all the candidates' performances

If you have not worked or traveled on a political campaign, you really cannot imagine the importance of sheer mind-destroying, bone-sapping, emotion-straining, personality-fraying exhaustion as a factor in performances by candidates. Especially the moments that seem angry, thin-skinned, dazed-sounding, ill-advised, or clumsily-worded. Where there is a "gaffe," there is usually an over-tired candidate backed up by over-tired staff.

I'm not saying this is the only activity that pushes people beyond reasonable limits, sleep-wise. (Combat. Medical-intern duty. Overnight shift work or long distance trucking. Infants in the house. Etc.) I'm saying that it's the one where the very great importance of the fatigue-tax is most likely to be missed by onlookers.

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Bill Clinton, Joe Gibbs

Two masters of their disciplines, who triumphed while young and stepped aside from competition (Clinton because he had to) while still in top form. Gibbs was 52 when he retired for the first time as Redskins coach, with three Superbowl wins behind him and election to the Hall of Fame ahead. Clinton was 54 when he watched George W. Bush sworn in as his successor, knowing that he would have won in a landslide if he were allowed to run again.

Then each returned. Coach Gibbs, for a disspiriting 31-36 four-year stint with the Redskins capped, if that's the right word, by the extremely disspiriting playoff loss to the Seahawks three days ago (and his resignation today). President Clinton, for what looks like a disspiriting 0-2 run as his wife's campaign booster and apparent strategist, and occasional negative-spin specialist against the candidate who is beating her. [Update: Coach-President Clinton has in fact opened 1-1. The questions below still apply.]

Will either of them be glad he came back into the fray? Were they rash to defy the maxim that there are no second acts in American lives? Other people have much worse problems, and Bill Clinton is probably not the most disspirited member of his household right now. Nonetheless I feel for both him and Gibbs.

Addendum: As readers Matt Megas and Robert Lamirande have pointed out, other obvious entries in this category include: Earl Weaver, who was brilliantly successful in his first stint as manager of the Orioles and then had his only losing season ever during his brief return run; Michael Jordan, who had the least successful of his several comebacks when he joined the Washington Wizards at the end of his career; and, tragically, too many boxers to mention, all of whom kept coming back.

A distraction from New Hampshire news

For a little glimpse of life in a not-quite-new apartment building in Beijing, and as a way to pass the time while the NH vote comes in, see if you can guess why my wife and I are spending so much time studying sites like this one.

(OK, if you don't want to click, it's about how to tell if you're being poisoned in your dwelling by sewer gas. Ah, the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent!)

For further amusement and distraction, feel free to tell your friends that in China the overnight news will cover primary voting in the state called 新罕布什尔 or sometimes 新罕布夏, xin hanbushier or xin hanbuxia. Yes, those are two versions of "New Hampshire," the second apparently with a Boston accent.

The NYT introduces a wordsmith

Wow.

Suppose you had just received one of the most important opportunities in opinion journalism: a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. Suppose it was all the more important because it gave you a base in what would normally be considered enemy territory, right there alongside Paul Krugman and Frank Rich and the NYT's own editorials. Suppose your debut column came at a moment of peak political excitement, with the surprise of the Iowa caucuses just behind us and the New Hampshire primaries one day away.

In those circumstances, would this be the best you could come up with for the very first paragraphs of your very first column? It is what the new NYT columnist William Kristol has offered to introduce himself:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

I'm saying nothing about the content here. Indeed the subject -- how the GOP should run against Barack Obama -- is one on which readers would want to hear a well-connected Republican's views.

I am talking instead about the breathtaking banality of expression.

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Winter fun, Beijing

Outdoor ice skating, Sanlitun area, Beijing, January 6.

What I found (sincerely) most charming about the scene: the "Stay Off the Ice" signs along the banks.

Maybe this is why Hillary lost in Iowa? (Boiled-frog dept)

A head start for the historians: Perhaps it was because in the final weekend of campaigning she fell back on that hoariest and most boneheaded of political cliches, the boiled-frog canard?*

“If you want to boil a frog, don’t put it in hot water because it will jump right out,” she said. “You put it in cold water and then turn up the heat gradually and it’s a goner.”

Mrs. Clinton punctuates the parable by declaring that “we have got to figure out how not to be the frog in cold water.”

OK. But we have also got to figure out how, for the sake of scientific accuracy, freshness in language, and the dignity of the poor frogs, we can stop talking about them in this heartless and formulaic way. (By the way, minus points to the New York Times for reporting the episode as if Sen. Clinton were using a clever image.) Soon, I will release the results of the contest to find other words to get across the point that people can get used to slowly worsening circumstances that would shock them if confronted all at once.

If you're ready for more on the topic, try this, this, this, this, and this. And I'm an equal-opportunity frog defender: I'm picking on Hillary Clinton at the moment because she's the only one I've noticed picking on the frogs.

* Yes, yes, I understand the irony of using canard to describe a tale about les grenouilles

The essential exchange of the New Hampshire Democrats' debate

It involved Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, on the power of words in presidential leadership.

Each made his or her respective point clearly, calmly, and appealingly. This was not an ambush or a gotcha or a gaffe or an unintentionally revealing quicksilver exchange. It was the expression of thought-through and well expressed views. And on the merits I think it left the Clinton camp at a terrible disadvantage.

Clinton, after pointing out that Obama voted for an energy bill that was full of the special-interest tax breaks he now criticizes in speeches:

So you know, words are not actions.

And as beautifully presented and passionately felt as they are, they are not action. You know, what we've got to do is translate talk into action and feeling into reality. I have a long record of doing that, of taking on the very interests that you have just rightly excoriated because of the overdue influence that they have in our government. And you know, probably nobody up here has been the subject of more incoming fire from the Republicans and the special interests, so I think I know exactly what I'm walking into and I am prepared to take them on.

Then, after an appeal by John Edwards to the Teddy Roosevelt tradition of head-on trust-busting, this response from Obama:

Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes....

[T]he truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Of course each of them was right. Each expressed part of the job of a president, or any leader. Words and deeds. Talk and action. Poetry and prose. Presidents obviously do best when they can do both.

But only Obama captured what is unique about a president's role. A President's actions matter -- Lyndon Johnson with his legislation, Richard Nixon with his opening to China -- but lots of other people can help shape policies. A President's words often matter more, and only he -- or she -- can express them. Grant led the Union Army, but Abraham Lincoln, in addition to selecting Grant, wrote and delivered his inaugural and Gettysburg addresses. Long before Franklin Roosevelt actually did anything about the Great Depression, his first inaugural address ("the only thing we have to fear...") was important in itself. The same was true of Winston Churchill just after he succeeded Neville Chamberlain. It would be years before the Nazi advance would be contained, but Churchill's words and bearing were indispensable to Britain's recovery.

Certainly Hillary Clinton knows this. And she knows the political record of poetry-vs-prose matchups in the past. Kennedy vs. Nixon. Carter vs. Ford (yes, Carter was a man of healing-America poetry in those days). Reagan vs. Mondale. And of course the first Candidate Clinton against his Democratic rival Paul Tsongas and then against the first President Bush. She is playing the hand she holds, but it's worse than the other hand.

One extra thought on this point, from Jimmy Carter himself. This is the way he described the words-vs-action tension in the major speech that laid out his human rights policy, the commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977. I am partial to this formulation, because I was involved in putting it together. But I think it, like Obama's comment, is closer to what Americans expect of their president than what Hillary Clinton has been left with, the "let me handle the details" appeal. Especially what they'll expect of the next president:

We live in a world that is imperfect and which will always be imperfect--a world that is complex and confused and which will always be complex and confused.I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

Two political anecdotes

Yeah, yeah, anecdotes aren't proof. But they get your attention. Two that have gotten mine:

* The truly startling one was a conversation just now with a very close family friend who, through a lifetime of voting that began in the Harry Truman era, has always and only gone Republican and still refers to G.W. Bush strictly as "The President." The friend said: "If Obama is the nominee, I'll vote for him. I'd never vote for her" -- meaning Hillary Clinton. This friend lives in a swing state.

* Speaking of Hillary Clinton, just before the Iowa results I was struck by this fact: I had come across countless people in the previous two years who assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. In fact, I can hardly think of anyone who didn't assume that. But in all that time I have met only a handful for people who were actually for her. And in my experience, every one of these people had been part of the Greater Clinton team.

There had always been away to explain away this paradox. Perhaps Hillary Clinton '08 would be a version of Richard Nixon '68 -- beloved by few, but still grinding out a win. But the other possibility was that the tensions couldn't forever be contained -- if people don't really like a candidate, in the end the candidate won't win. The Nixon scenario isn't looking so likely now.

Iowa tableaux: stagecraft by the Democrats

Back to the world of the internet, and real-time TV coverage, just soon enough to see the post-caucus statements by the leading candidates. About the Democrats:

John Edwards: attractive candidate, unattractive statement. If all the others who spoke last night (this morning, my time in Beijing) were too patently aware that their bodies might be in Iowa but the audience they cared about was in New Hampshire and beyond, Edwards sounded as if he thought he were still in a living room in Cedar Rapids. It never pays to sound either grudging or angry when down. Even for the plainest operational reasons -- looking good and optimistic for the elections just ahead, not alienating the likely nominee -- and apart from its being the right thing to do, there was no excuse for not naming and congratulating Barack Obama.

Barack Obama: Of course we can't be sure that he'll win the nomination, although that seems likely right now, or that he'll be elected if he is the nominee -- though given the wounded candidates and intellectual collapse on the Republican side, that seems practically a lock. And as Bill Clinton has so helpfully pointed out, it's a roll of the dice what kind of president he would actually be. But to watch his statement live was to realize, even as it was happening, that you were seeing a moment of history people were likely to remember and discuss for a very long time.

Hillary Clinton: Everyone has said everything that can be said about the challenges for her campaign and her message. To me, the scene on camera drowned out anything she said in her statement. She, a trouper, managed a convincing-enough smile and acceptably jaunty "the fight's just begun!" tone. The staff around herself simply looked ashen -- even though as pros they surely recognized that they were on TV just like her, even though as pros they must have known how forcefully body language speaks. One just to the left of her chewed gum grimly and desperately through her speech. Another, to the right, made me think of a family member at an accident scene. (Let me not be coy about this: when looking at him I thought immediately of the stricken face of Bobby Kennedy's loyal aide Frank Mankiewicz forty years ago when he announced at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles that Kennedy had been killed. It's macabre, but it's the visual connection that immediately came to mind.)

And Bill Clinton!!! Who managed a wan smile but for seconds on end stood motionless, as if traumatized or stuffed. Better than anyone else in the country he must understand the situation. The young candidate with the sex appeal and the fun and the magic and the sense of the future and the opportunity to shed the old -- Clinton knows the advantages that candidate has. And he knows full well how feeble the appeals to "experience" and "ready from day one" and "competence and responsibility" were when they were issued sixteen years ago by a candidate who really was superbly prepared and experienced: the incumbent president, eight-year vice president, victorious war commander, former ambassador and CIA director George H. W. Bush.

Update: As several readers have pointed out, one of the people I noticed was not technically a staff member but New York's lieutenant governor, David Paterson. I thought of writing the first time around that if i had been in the U.S. over the last 18 months I might have recognized more of the figures on the stage (apart from Bill and Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright.) And in general I might have used the word "supporters" or "team" rather than "staff," since many were office holders or other luminaries rather than paid assistants. Whoever they were, they looked pretty miserable.