One other Aspen/China session

This also resurrected from previous post on (somewhat-insiderish) Aspen blog site:

There have been so many discussions about China that I can't keep track even of those I've been involved in. But I managed to take notes at one involving Li Cheng, a Shanghai native now at the Brookings Institution, who in a very droll way (under questioning by Orville Schell) made a number of interesting points.

Li's stated Big Idea theme was "China's Future: A paradox of hope and fear." I won't try to convey the arguments there, but here were a few of the apercus:

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Free Flight update (kicking off a series)

The book I had most fun writing was Free Flight, which came out six years ago. At the time, the hub-and-spoke nature of the airline system was driving passengers crazy with inconvenience and delay. Also at the time, a variety of entrepreneurs and innovators -- some in little garage-scale businesses, some within the federal government itself -- were dreaming up a system of decentralized, flexible, point-to-point air travel based on radically more efficient and less expensive small aircraft.

For a while after the 9/11 attacks, some people thought that nothing other than air-marshal-laden airliners would ever again be allowed in the sky. But the innovation continued, and the crowding, hassle, and inconvenience of the hub-and-spoke system have become worse than ever. Many of the projects that were gleams in the eye when I wrote the book are now going enterprises: for instance, Cirrus Design, which was then a little family operation, is now by far the most popular maker of small piston-engine planes in the world. (Disclosure: I bought one of Cirrus's earliest planes, at list price, after writing the book -- and sold it, for not that much less than I paid, on the used market when I moved to China last year. As reported earlier, my one experience in flying a plane in China was so chastening that I will not try that again.)

A whole string of other updates awaits. To begin with: the news last week that this same Cirrus company has entered the "personal jet" market with a new model of its own. More details from Cirrus here and from AVWeb here. Official portrait below:

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Video link: Lehrer News Hour interview about Shenzhen

Just before leaving China last month, I showed up in the pre-dawn haze (referring to my state of mind, not the weather) at the Shanghai Media Group TV studios for an interview with Jeff Brown, of the Lehrer News Hour, about the nature of Chinese factory life. Streaming video is here; RealAudio here; MP3 here; transcript here.

Microsoft, Google, and desktop search (updated, after jump)

Too much is still unclear about the latest Google-Microsoft staredown (over Vista's "Instant Search" disk-search function) to hazard any larger opinion about its implications or merits. It got my attention for this simple reason: it reassured me that I wasn't going crazy. At least not in this particular way.

Under the reported terms of the settlement, Microsoft will change Vista so that users can turn off the search function that now comes built-in and turned on. For several months I have been driving myself crazy and feeling like an idiot because I had such trouble doing just that.

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This strikes me as an important search engine story

Via Network World, a report that appears to validate something I have long suspected: what you find, when you're searching the web, depends very heavily on which search engine you use. That is, rather than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Alta Vista, Ask, etc providing overlapping views of the central data repository that is the World Wide Web, each returns a particular sampling of that data, which can differ to a startling degree from the other samples.

For instance, the study compared the first-page searches from major engines and found that on average:

• 69.6% of Google’s [first page results] were unique to Google.
• 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
• 80.1% of Live’s were unique to Live.
• 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

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I'm mad at Earthlink. Or maybe it's mad at me?

Here's the scenario:

1) Someone with an @Earthlink.com email address sends me a message. [Correction: I mean @Earthlink.net]

2) I write back.

3) I get a charming, mock-affable message from the Earthlink spam filter saying that my reply has been blocked. (Sample, with identifying details removed, at end of post.)

I assume this is because my IP address shows that I'm in China. Or because I'm using a wi-fi system with dynamic IP address assignment. Or something. Whatever it is, other email systems are able to cope with it. This bounceback happens whenever someone from @Earthlink.com sends me mail. It does not happen (so far) with anyone else.

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How media "guidance" works in China

The local Chinese- and English-language press has carried many stories about the Shanxi province brick kilns in in which large numbers of people, many of them children, had been captured and forced to work in slave-labor conditions. These are horrifying stories, and the state-controlled media, rather than trying to rationalize them away, has generally moved into muckraker mode with hunts for the malefactors.

But a translated document on China Digital Times, from UC Berkeley, is as sobering in its own way. The site carries what it says is a translation of a memo from the Communist Party's Central Office of External Communication, which offers this guidance about the unsettling news.

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Surprise post-9/11 movie tip

I liked the book but was in no hurry to see the movie version of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. As Pacific Northwest atmospherics it was great; as a mystery it was very good; as a story of star-crossed love it was not that interesting to me; and as a reminder of the racial injustices against Japanese-Americans in World War II it was worthy but I thought already got the point.

Now I realize: that was pre-9/11 thinking. (The movie came out in 1999.)

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Worth checking out: the new Ask.com

I love Google. Everyone loves Google. But I’ve also had a long secret fondness for Ask.com, nee AskJeeves.

The original AskJeeves concept of trying to figure out what questions users might eventually ask, and preparing answers for them, had some obvious limitations. (Same ones that are evident in the typical FAQ file.) But over the last year or two Ask’s search system has introduced enough features and tweaks to be worth visiting along with Google. For instance, I’ve found that its image search gets more quickly to what I’m looking for than most alternatives.

Recently Ask rolled out the new search page it has been working on for quite a while.

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You say Pataki, I say Pataca

I am in Macau again, another southern Chinese haunt I’ve seen nearly as often as Shenzhen.

I know it is wrong, very wrong — and ignorant, too! — to judge this way, but: Macau will seem more august when its currency is called something other than the “pataca.” “That will be 2,000 patacas, please.”

Or maybe it’s not that wrong. Maybe Macau’s Chinese-speaking majority agrees! The Portuguese words printed on Macau banknotes (this was, of course, once a Portuguese colony) say cinquenta patacas, etc. But the Chinese characters on the pataca bills list the currency as 圓 — our old friend yuan, the same name used throughout the Chinese mainland on People’s Republic of China banknotes. (There it takes the “simplified” form 圆.) Here is one case where oddly-translated Western words are actually a blessing.

Words of Wisdom from a Chinese official

No, not about the Sopranos. Didn’t see any of this season; don’t want to hear or read about the finale; will get the whole-season boxed set for $5 or so from the local dealer when it’s ready in the next few days.

According to today’s (English-language, state-controlled) China Daily, the vice-minister of Construction, Qiu Baoxing, has noticed that non-stop bulldozing, paving, and skyscraper-building have been less than ideal for China’s cultural and architectural patrimony.

Indeed, he goes so far as to compare the cultural/architectural effects of today’s gilded age construction boom to those of China’s two outright catastrophes of the past half century: the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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No wonder I can't find anything

Several days ago I was looking for the entrance to one of the big Carrefour outlets in Shanghai. This is the French-based retailer that is second to Wal-Mart in overall global sales but is far more successful than Wal-Mart in China. A Wal-Mart official once told me that he thought hostility to recent U.S. foreign policy had been a drag on the firm’s brand-image in China. Who knows — that certainly hasn’t slowed down McDonald’s, Apple, Dell, Buick, or Starbucks.

On a sidewalk I asked a security guard, in Chinese, where the store might be. The “could you tell me where” part of the question seemed to come across serviceably. But the store’s name, as I phrased it, led to a look of utter bafflement on the guard’s face. I used the Chinese sounds I thought most comparable — ka ri fu ah — and added the words for department store, but I got nowhere.

Then I stepped back and looked up, and saw that the guard and I were standing right in front of Carrefour’s main entrance. I thanked him and stepped into the store, only to wonder: how can this be? I mean, apart from cognitive failure on the guard’s side, and linguistic on mine?

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A personal note about manufacturing

The title of my latest article in the Atlantic is “China Makes, the World Takes.” The title wasn’t my idea– I believe it came from Corby Kummer, who edited this article as he has nearly everything I’ve written for the magazine in the last 25 years. But the instant I heard it I thought: yes, that’s right. It exactly suits the argument of the article. And as a bonus, it has great family and emotional resonance for me.

The title of course is a play on the famous slogan spelled out in neon lights over the Delaware River bridge in Trenton, New Jersey: “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.”

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What is Rudy Giuliani talking about???

This is what I am denied, or spared, by being trapped in Chinese factories or hospitals and getting only intermittent glimpses of real-time Campaign 2008 rhetoric:

Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the first substantive question of the debate. Knowing everything we know now, good idea or bad idea to have invaded Iraq?

Absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.

Huh????

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My visit to the Shanghai Skin Disease and Sexually Transmitted Disease Hospital

It started two weeks ago: drinks on a beautiful Shanghai evening with a visiting American couple at Barbarossa, a surreal Arabic-themed indoor/outdoor restaurant right in People’s Square. The husband was a doctor, here for a consultation on product-safety issues. “I’m a dermatologist, and so….” I stop listening to the sentence at that point but corner him as we’re leaving. “Funny you should mention you’re a dermatologist. Would you mind taking a look at….?” People ask me this kind of favor all the time, and I usually say yes. (Will I read Cousin Sally’s book manuscript? Can I suggest a publisher for a collection of poems?) In the cycle of karma, it was my turn to ask advice.

That very morning I had noticed a tiny rough patch of skin on the bridge of my nose. Just the normal collapse and decay, or something more specific to worry about?

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Fighters planes over Shanghai (cont): Back to DEFCON5

According to a Shanghainese friend (whose name I’m omitting because, really, how much good can it do a Chinese citizen to be seeing discussing anything fighter-plane related with a foreign journalist?), the planes I saw zooming overhead recently were probably just on a training mission from a local air field.

Sure enough, a quick check with Google Earth shows an obviously- military airfield just north of town, on Chongming Island at the mouth of the mighty Yangtze.

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More good news about American Muslims

Last fall, in an Atlantic cover story called “Declaring Victory,” I discussed the one big advantage the United States held over most European countries when it came to dealing with Islamic terrorists: the loyalty and assimilation of America’s Muslim and Arabic-origin populations. The two categories are not identical — many U.S. Muslims are from Pakistan, India, Iran, or other non-Arab countries; many Arab-Americans are non-Islamic, especially Lebanese Christians — but they are similar in overall success in America and resistance to extremist views. For instance (from that article):

“The patriotism of the American Muslim community has been grossly underreported,” says Marc Sageman, who has studied the process by which people decide to join or leave terrorist networks. According to Daniel Benjamin, a former official on the National Security Council and coauthor of The Next Attack, Muslims in America “have been our first line of defense.” Even though many have been “unnerved by a law-enforcement approach that might have been inevitable but was still disturbing,” the community has been “pretty much immune to the jihadist virus.”

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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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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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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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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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Welcome to TheAtlantic.com! (This site's address is about to change)

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year!

The Atlantic.com: online since 1993!

The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days!

Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places.

Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad.

Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all.

See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest.

Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

Welcome to TheAtlantic.com! (This site's address is about to change)

The Atlantic Monthly: 150 years old this year!

The Atlantic.com: online since 1993!

The new, improved, expanded Atlantic Online: ready for unveiling in the next few days!

Part of the new, improved, expandedness is the incorporation of blogs by various staff members, including me. So the new, improved, barely-expanded address for this little chronicle is http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.

A switchover process is beginning. Over the next week or two archived posts, links, categories, and other material from this site will be transferred to the new one. Eventually (as happened with the mighty AndrewSullivan.com, when he joined the Atlantic) all outside links to this site itself will automatically be redirected to the appropriate part of the Atlantic's site. Until then new posts will appear in both places.

Unfortunately it turns out that RSS feeds can't be transferred automatically. So anyone interested can go to the Atlantic's site and set up a new RSS feed here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, which -- as I look out the window here in Shanghai and see a man hauling a laden oxcart down the street, with himself in the role of ox -- is in the big view not that bad.

Thanks to people who have contacted me via this site, and special thanks to those who over the last decade have helped me cobble together an evolving web presence: David Rothman, Chet and Ginger Richards, Jonathan Kibera and Tom Fallows, and most recently, with this current WordPress site, James Cham. I am very grateful to all.

See you at TheAtlantic.com, and thanks for your interest.

Jim Fallows -- oops, I mean "JamesFallows.TheAtlantic.com."

Fair but depressing report on aviation

Matthew Wald has long covered the aviation-disaster beat (among other topics) for the New York Times. Through his stories he has struck me as being very, very conscious of all the things that can go wrong in the air. A healthy appreciation of the risks of flight is actually a desirable trait in pilots, but I had assumed that when he thought about pilots, especially amateur pilots, he would be in the "why would anyone take such a risk?" camp.

His story today in the New York Times is actually quite fair and calm sounding, which makes its conclusion the more sobering.

Continue reading "Fair but depressing report on aviation" »

Communicating in China

I got on an elevator on the 17th floor of an office building in Shanghai, headed for the lobby. It stopped at the 16th floor, where a conference was apparently just breaking up. Thirteen other people, all Chinese, got in -- as many as the elevator would hold. The door closed, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder-blade -- and ten kept talking on their mobile phones. Floor by floor in the descent, the volume went up, as each person spoke with ever-increasing loudness to compensate for the (ever-increasing) ambient noise.

The good news for China: mobile phones work everywhere --

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David Halberstam

The news of David Halberstam's death is a surprisingly shocking blow. In general, a man's passing at age 73 cannot seem wholly unnatural or out of sequence. But it was hard to think of Halberstam as being as anything but young. He was as full of ambition and energy and enthusiasm and spark as anyone I know, of any age.

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Is it just "fog"?

Or perhaps "mist"? As mentioned earlier, the relatively grim vista on Sunday morning -- Earth Day! -- could have been affected by weather that led to rain on Sunday afternoon. And today, Monday, it's actually bright and pretty outside. But a friend reminded me of what the cityscape looked like (from a higher floor in the same building), not long ago on a dry day. He calls his picture, below, "Shanghai Sunrise," since he was looking east toward the daybreak over Pudong. It features a sun whose color can't easily be explained by "mist" or "fog."

When people say China has a pollution problem... (updated)

.... this is the kind of thing they are talking about. Shanghai skyline, from our apartment near People's Square, 8:30am China time, Sunday morning, April 22, 2007. And Shanghai's not even that bad, compared with most other big cities.

UPDATE: After the jump are more photos of the blear, followed by the way the same scenes look on a very nice day here.

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Sun-Times vs China update (re Va Tech shooting)

The Chicago Sun-Times has altered the story by Michael Sneed mentioned in the previous post. Now there is an "explanation" about earlier suspicions pointing toward a Chinese suspect, rather than a Korean:

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Virginia Tech shooting: one American woman terrifies China

It was Tuesday night China time when the authorities in Blacksburg, Virginia, identified the gunman as a young Korean. For the previous 12 hours, the worst traits in the Chinese media had been brought out by an even-worse lapse by part of the U.S. media. One -- and as far as I can tell, only one -- journalist in the U.S. identified the killer publicly and quickly as a student from China who had recently been given his visa in Shanghai. During the long night after the shooting U.S. time, which was daytime Tuesday in China, that report was picked up -- surprise! -- by Fox news and a few smaller U.S. outlets, and, via web news sites, it quickly made its way to China.

What the Chinese media did next was bad in a predictable way.

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The uneven hand of the law

A few days ago on Nanjing Xi Lu, a very main tourist and shopping street in Shanghai, we saw a yelling and shoving match break out. A group of uniformed officials swooped down on the merchants who had laid out their blankets on the sidewalk to sell "Tibetan" jewelry, stone or wooden carvings, and similar little wares. The officials grabbed the goods and stuffed them into big bags with official markings on them. The team we saw was headed by an ominous-looking character, a tall, well-muscled young guy in plainclothes who wore sunglasses and a walkie-talkie with earpiece, Secret Service-style.

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Here is a good idea: Brits drop "war on terror"

It has been obvious for quite a while that calling the effort to contain violent extremists a "global war on terror" does nothing to help the cause, and hurts in many ways. It unifies opponents who might otherwise have little in common. It gives them what they want, in elevating them to parity with the world's great powers. To the extent the U.S. or U.K. public pays attention to it, it further helps the terrorist cause, by making people, well, terrorized. To the extent the public comes to ignore it, it cheapens the whole concept of war.

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Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1

I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara. The better comparison is to Jimmy Swaggart. Let me explain, through the roundabout medium of Norman Podhoretz.

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A great 'graphic novel': Shenzhen by Guy Delisle

I have been spending a lot of time in southern China, especially in the factory-wonderworld of the Pearl River Delta region. The latest China Southern flight from Shenzhen, in this delta, back to Shanghai was delayed many hours -- "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to tell you that Flight XXXX to Shanghai will be delayed because of: delay." But the time was more pleasant thanks to Guy Delisle's wonderful comic book -- oops, graphic novel -- about his own journey to the same city, Shenzhen.

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Reason to live, cont. (Beer in Shanghai dept.)

Purchased yesterday from the young heroes working to improve life in Shanghai:

Foreground: beer skyline. Background: Shanghai skyline, east side of People's Square.

Intellectual piracy? Who, us?

In observation of the U.S. announcement that it was taking complaints about illegal Chinese copying of books, videos, music, software, etc to the WTO, my wife and I decided to check out the local pirate-video stores. (Here, the way the NY Times explains the complaint; here, the way the People's Daily does. Any time you're tempted to think the world is in any sense "flat," try a compare-and-contrast exercise like this to see how unevenly ideas and perspectives spread beyond their native shores.)

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Signs that the apocalypse is near (Shanghai edition)

1) On a beautiful spring afternoon in the city, the gingko trees along (relatively) charming Da Gu Lu, beginning to leaf out, are filled with .... twittering birds! Where did they come from?

More ominous thought: how long can they last?

2) On Chengdu Lu, beneath the North-South Elevated Highway, a taxicab roars up to a red light, like always, and prepares like always to mow down the pedestrians in a marked crosswalk, with the green light in their favor. But a uniformed "traffic assistant" steps bravely into the cab's path,

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Defining the "op-ed book" (David Frum edition)

Imagine my surprise when, in a wee-hours bout of jet lag on the first evening back in Shanghai, I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune. No, the surprise was not the radical shift in media experience: the previous morning, in Washington, I had waded through the thick heap of that one day's New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, feeling like an explorer cutting through the jungle with a machete. Now, I had one slim, precious little document in my hands, which I felt I had to guard carefully and every one of whose articles I intended to pore over.

Rather the surprise was what my poring-over revealed.

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Oddest advertising slogan in America? (this week)

In the olden days -- that is, last month, before my hiatus in the US -- listening to NPR broadcasts on the internet meant using either the Real or the Windows Media player, or iTunes. Now NPR appears to have its own proprietary NPR Audio Player. It works fine, and -- good for NPR -- has space for a billboard-ad sponsor, bringing at least some revenue to the network.

Right now the sponsor is the British tourism agency, which is flogging the motto: "Be a BRIT different."

Huh??? Did any native speaker of, well, American, get a look at this campaign before it went live?

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Worst pilot in America?

Many pilot-enthusiast forums (including my favorite, the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association site) are buzzing about this audio file, which indeed is quite incredible, plus incredibly embarrassing.

Basic plotline: at Sanford airport, just north of Orlando, a commercial jetliner tells air traffic control that it has a problem. The plane is coming in for a landing, with 100+ people aboard, and the pilots can't be sure whether the nose wheel has come down.

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Happy flying, Charles Simonyi

I had two things in common with Charles Simonyi when I lived in Seattle in 1999 and 2000: an interest in flying, and a friendship with Michael Kinsley, who introduced us at lunch one day in a dining hall on the Microsoft campus. The distance in all other ways was vast.

Simonyi was one of the company's true titans, second only to the incomparable BillG on the general-esteem scale. According to a recent article in Technology Review, Gates himself calls Simonyi "one of the great programmers of all time." I was a lowly short-term contractor at Microsoft, going to work each day adorned with the "orange badge of shame," the orange-colored ID for temp workers, as opposed to the blue badge for "real" employees. For six months I was on the team preparing the next upgrade to Word -- a program Simonyi had invented. From the (very nice) house my wife and I had rented in Seattle's Leschi district, on the slopes of the west bank of Lake Washington, we could see Simonyi's (futuristic and stupendous) destination-spa/home being finished on the opposite shore. Simonyi has frequently dated Martha Stewart. I have been more fortunate in my love life.

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Wolfowitz = McNamara, chapter 402

From John Cassidy's (very good) profile of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, in the New Yorker:

Wolfowitz refused to talk about Iraq specifically, but he told me that he still believes in the vision of a moderate, democratic Middle East.

Jeez louise. How much inner peace does it suggest about a person -- the most famed intellectual in the Bush administration -- if he refuses to talk about the event for which he will always be principally known? ("John Hinckley refused to talk about shooting President Reagan specifically, but he told me that he still believes in his vision of a happy future with Jodie Foster.")

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Tech column from May issue of the Atlantic now up

Tech column on Central Desktop, Basecamp, NoteShare, etc, now posted on the Atlantic's site. Subscribers only. Subscribe!

Traveling around the U.S. to see friends and family, desperately loading in provisions for the next long stint in China (which begins with DC-SF-Shanghai flight tomorrow), taking a while off to be sick, talking with colleagues about next largish article from China, and other duties can keep a man off the internet, as they have done me for me through the last week. But soon enough the stimulation of landing at Pudong airport, fighting through the crowds and peering through the haze, and thinking: a lot of interesting things are going on.

Life is interesting (Gotham edition)

Staying at the unbearably hip Hudson Hotel in NYC. Too hip to need normal-sized rooms; too hip to need more than two light bulbs per room (three, counting a little desk light) or fridge or other features standard at, say, Hawthorne Suites. Ah, variety in life.

But hip enough to have the front entrance jammed with beautiful people in their 20s.

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Colbert-ology, or what you know if you've seen the show live..

... as I did, a couple of hours ago, for what will be broadcast a couple of hours from now.

* Extremely nice-seeming guy (out of persona), which is another way of saying: phenomenal acting job the instant the in-persona segments begin.

* Larger and sturdier-seeming guy in person than on TV, reversing the normal "gee, you look different in person" effect. The normal rule is that famous people look smaller in real life than you're expecting, with a few obvious exceptions

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The theater of "security," part 1037

United Air Lines, San Francisco-Dulles, oversold plane, passengers fighting to avoid being bumped. My wife and I luckily end up with really nice seats. In keeping with our larger attitude these first few days back from China, we are actively grateful for every comfort.

While waiting for the flight we end up sitting in the area where all the flight attendants are congregating and chatting about their schedules. From this vantage point, 30 minutes before boarding time, we see two people who are obviously this flight's air marshals walk down the jetway toward the plane. To ensure the safety of the traveling public, I won't give further details, except to say:

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The hot frogs ask: Et tu, Al?

I finally took the unwise step of searching Google News for recent uses of the (totally fictitious) boiled-frog cliche.

Sigh. Of the many examples, these two were most dispiriting:

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What you first notice if you're in America after six months in China...

It is obvious, but: The wealth. The things. The overall abundance. (And, yeah, well, that you can speak English.) Plus, how clean the air is, and how many trees and birds and flowers there are, and how few unfinished edges -- open ditches, stacks of construction beams -- you come across. Since I'm in Northern California I haven't yet had the cliched reaction of how large the people themselves look. But I notice how sparse they seem to be on the streets, compared with any Chinese town.

The name for America in Chinese and several other Asian languages is 美国, or meiguo, "beautiful country."

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Reason to live: beer in Shanghai, cont.

Now that I have spent 24 hours in America, where every product is available every place all the time, this observation seems pathetic, but: this was what I was excited about the day I left Shanghai.

The best news I have heard on the globalization front in a long, long time is that into the sea of indistinguishable, flavorless, soulless, depressing Tiger, Chinese-Suntory, Chinese-Carlsberg, Qingdao, REEB, and the rest of the sorry lot will soon arrive.... good beer. Great beer! Rogue Dead Guy Ale!

Continue reading "Reason to live: beer in Shanghai, cont." »

Airline security update: the knives are back!

Shanghai-San Francisco, UAL, 10 hours+ in the plane, the magic of business class! I am tall enough, and old enough, and have had enough experience with the 31" seat pitch in economy, to appreciate every minute in which my knees are not jammed into the seat ahead.

Bigger surprise: full set of metal cutlery with the meal, knife too!

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Translation tool bonus: Pera-kun and Wakan

In the current issue of the Atlantic, I have a tech column about new translation tools by Google and Yahoo for coping with "hard" languages, notably Arabic and Chinese.

Here are two more free utilities I learned about too late to include in the column, but which I now use frequently for dealing with Chinese.

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Silent Spring

A week ago I noticed a dark object arcing across the sky, at eye level from our 22nd-floor apartment in Shanghai. I just caught it in peripheral vision, rather than looking at it directly. Without thinking consciously, I began speculating: maybe a hawk? Maybe one of those turkey vultures that seem to show up against stormy springtime skies? Maybe just a crow, or a large and very dark pigeon?

Then I turned and saw what it was: a black heavy-duty plastic trash bag, swooping up and down in the turbulent wind. I thought a minute more and realized what I had been seeing but not noticing through the previous months: there are no birds in big Chinese cities.

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Congressional hearings update: welcome back, C-Span

As mentioned previously here and here, Congressional committee hearings are the most interesting and usually the most important parts of what the House and Senate do. But until now they have been nearly impossible to observe if you didn't queue up that morning outside the hearing room in Washington, if C-Span didn't choose that particular session to cover, or if you didn't tune into C-Span (or set the TiVo) between 1:45am and 3:20am when the hearing was being shown. All that is about to change.

The main players in this process have been Carl Malamud, who has been forcing the issue; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to whom Malamud recently delivered his "unsolicited report" explaining how webcasts of hearings could be made available in a standardized, searchable, downloadable form; and of course C-Span, which has recently done something very admirable.

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Improbable but true: Colbert Report appearance March 27

Or at least, improbable but currently scheduled. First trip to the US in six months coming up soon. If current plans hold, it will include an appearance on the Colbert Report on March 27. We'll see.

I just hope that my latest unfortunate made-in-China haircut, an unintended Tintin-style (but for the middle aged) fauxhawk has come closer to growing out by then.

Happy Birthday, Tom

At the White House press briefing on March 15, 1977, Jody Powell, then the press secretary for President Carter, had some important business to cover. The President was about to give his first major speech on foreign policy, an address to the U.N. General Assembly, and Powell would offer a preview. There were twists and turns to discuss in the development of Carter's National Energy Policy, which he had introduced in a "fireside chat" in February and which he would lay out in detail in a major address in April. The Administration proposed to liberalize the rules for Americans who wanted to travel to Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, or Vietnam. And so on.

But before getting into the murk of policy, Powell announced a bit of in-house news. The first child born to a member of the new administration's staff had made his appearance. Very early that morning, Thomas Mackenzie Fallows had been born at George Washington University Hospital; he and his mother, Deborah, were both doing well.

Thirty years to the day later, both are still doing very well. To Jody Powell, thank you for this consideration. To our son Tom: Happy Birthday today!

Observer vs. Economist, or Yanks vs Redcoats yet again

The fraternity of American journalists who have dared speak irreverently of The Economist in public has just grown by 25%:

Previous members were: Michael Lewis (soon after Liar's Poker); Richard Stengel (in his pre editor-of-Time days); "Humphrey Greddon" (not in Zuleika Dobson but in yesteryear's Spy, under what must have been a pseudonym, and if I were a New York guy I'd know who the writer really was); and me, 15+ years ago. We now welcome to the club Tom Scocca of the Observer, on the strength of this offering, which (disclosure) refers back to other members, especially Stengel and me.

The 1991 Washington Post article of mine that Scocca mentions is here, and the updated intro to it is here.

If I've lost track of other people who meet the eligibility standards, sorry! And, by the way, the people I've come to know from The Economist are actually very nice. You can't help admiring the feat they have pulled off.

Carl Malamud campaign, updated

As mentioned earlier, Carl Malamud has been campaigning to get the real, juicy, usually most important parts of Congressional deliberations -- the numerous committee hearings that take place each day, not just the kabuki-like stylized rhetoric of the House and Senate floor so familiar from C-Span -- availabile for searchable, free, downloads on the internet. Most committees already produce their own webcasts, but there is no easy, standardized way to get at them.

Malamud has just released what he calls an "unsolicited report" to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the importance and practicality of his scheme. It is worth reading -- and, from what I can tell, worth implementing. Check it out.

Update: something must be happening with the MPAA

It's not just the shuttered video stores! No pirate DVD vendors in their usual spots on Shanghai's Nanjing Lu or Huaihai Lu this afternoon. None of the usual cadre of fake Rolex-Gucci-Prada hawkers on those same streets. Trade negotiators in town? Crackdown in honor of the National People's Congress in Beijing? Maybe a joint delegation from the MPAA and the Italian Ministry of Commerce? For now it's a mystery, at least to me.

The boiled-frog myth: hey, really, knock it off!

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is scientifically impressive, politically important, and no doubt personally redemptive for Gore himself, who has endured an injustice that would leave most people screaming all day every day. Plus, it's an Oscar winner! But as noted several months ago, the movie also contains one moment of pure ignoramus-hood: the perpetuation of the boiled-frog myth. ("Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll jump right out, but just raise the temperature slowly and he'll let himself be cooked." In reality the situation is more like: "Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and he'll be scalded to death, but give him a chance to escape when the slowly-warming water gets uncomfortable, and he will hop right out.")

Comes now The Economist, to give Gore (and countless other speech-makers) company.

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Hmm, I wonder if an MPAA delegation is in town

There are two rival DVD stores within a few blocks of my apartment. These are in addition to the street peddlers with little piles of DVDs laid out on blankets, or the semi-permanent vendors with their disks on carts or inside tiny shopfront booths. I prefer the stores because they'll warn you about DVDs that have dubbed-Russian soundtracks (a surprisingly large number, suggesting where a lot of the illicit copying is done) or were shot by someone lurking in a theater balcony. On those, you can hear other patrons coughing or munching popcorn through the show. The stores also have an in-house display machine on which you can try a disk and see whether it works before you shell out your 7 kuai, or 91 cents.

(Ethics note: I'll happily buy a legit DVD if I ever see one.)

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Another win for Carl Malamud (or: news you won't see in the May 2007 issue of the Atlantic)

About three weeks ago, I wrote the following short item while in Shanghai and sent it zooming across the ether to Washington DC, for inclusion as a tech-column sidebar in the May, 2007 issue of the Atlantic. You won't see it there, which is why I'm posting it here.

First, the item:

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Sympathy for Microsoft, again

Here is what a $1.30 version of Microsoft Vista looks like. Purchased a few hours ago for 10 RMB from a hawker outside SEG Plaza, Shenzhen's incredible bazaar of every electronic component known to man.

Gee, looks just like the real thing! How would anyone ever tell the difference? Or notice, say, that it's "Release Candidate 1," a late beta version, not the "real" thing? Fortunately, that information is concealed in English. ("Get Windows Vista RC1," underneath the girl in the wheatfield.)

As best I can make out, the info that is meant to be read, the Chinese material just above the (undoubtedly bogus) Product-ID number in the yellow background, is a set of helpful tips for installing Vista. For instance, you should reset the computer's system date from 2007 to 2088 or 2099, and you should not push the button that "authorizes" the software by checking with Microsoft HQ.

Maybe I'll try installing it on one of my non-frontline computers and see what happens.

Lidle lawsuit update: the myth of "aileron failure"

As mentioned earlier, the families of Cory Lidle and Tyler Stanger are suing the Cirrus Design corporation for "wrongful death" in the crash that killed both men last year.

Also as mentioned earlier, those families deserve every bit of empathy and condolence for the lasting consequences of their losses. If you know what it can mean to children to lose a parent this way, you can only wish these families the best.

But in light of extra details about purported grounds for the suit, I have no sympathy at all for the attorneys who, I can only assume, have used the families' grief to talk them into taking this misguided step.

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Folk sociology to the rescue: Chinese driving

I love folk etymology -- the fanciful derivations or histories of words based on explanations that "should" make sense even though they're not true. For instance, someone I know and love has taken to spelling respite as "rest bit," on the theory that it sounds the same and makes the meaning clearer.

Folk sociology is fun too: People do X because their ancestors did Y. This is practically a stand-alone industry in Japan, as wave after wave of defeated Western trade negotiators can attest. Why can't we buy your French skis? Because Japanese snow is different. Why can't we buy your American or Australian or Argentinian beef? Because Japanese intestines are different.

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The Cory Lidle case: from tragedy to tragic farce

To say it up front and clearly, the airplane crash last October that killed Cory Lidle, of the New York Yankees, and his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, was a terrible tragedy. In an instant everything changed not just for these two men but also for their wives and small children. Their families deserve the deepest sympathy. Their children deserve to hear through the years that their fathers were widely admired and well-liked men.

The dentist whose condo the airplane hit has now sued the families (really, the men's estates) for damages. On that I have no opinion. But according to this recent AP report, the families themselves have also sued the airplane's manufacturer, Cirrus Design, for "wrongful death," because of product liability, negligence, and other problems.

I have an opinion on this. It is a farce.

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Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: A nice man, not just an eminent one

I ran into Arthur Schlesinger perhaps ten times in my life. The first was 40 years ago, when he came to visit his son Andy during Andy's freshman year in college. I wandered by, from my room around the corner in the same freshman dorm, and was astonished to see the man whose A Thousand Days I had studied only a few months earlier in high school social studies class in California. With the Kennedy administration still in living memory, he was a real celebrity in those days, not just a successful writer, but he was unaffected and approachable to his son's new classmates.

The last time I saw him was a year or so ago, at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, a kind of Friar's Club for one-time presidential speechwriters.

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Market Crash Day in Shanghai

As I write it is Wednesday morning in Shanghai. Last evening, on Tuesday night, my wife and I went to dinner at a local Thai restaurant with three foreign friends, two young Americans and a European. It was 7pm here, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange had already closed after its 9% drop. It was 6am in New York, and the markets there had not yet opened for what would become the 400-plus point drop in the Dow.

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Rulon Gardner update: Pilot speaks

The pilot in the Rulon Gardner air crash has spoken, and has confirmed what seemed obvious about the crash from the facts. According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

The plane's pilot, Randy Brooks, sheepishly admitted Sunday night that their ordeal was the product of a moment of carelessness.

"I just got too close to the water and went in," said Brooks, who lives in Highland and is the owner and CEO of Barnes Ammunition in American Fork. "There was nothing wrong with the airplane or anything. I just screwed up."

Good for him for saying so. As for the screwing up itself....

Here we go again: Rulon Gardner plane crash

Another famous person has been in another publicized crash involving the same kind of small airplane I used to own and fly. Rulon Gardner, the charming, bulky, and admirable-seeming wrestler who pulled off an astonishing upset in the 2000 Olympics, was hurt when the Cirrus SR-22 carrying him and two other people hit the water in Lake Powell. All three got out of the plane before it sank but could easily have succumbed to hypothermia after their hour in the frigid water and night on the lakeshore waiting to be found and rescued.

Main point: I'm very glad they're all alive and (relatively) well.

Next point: What's going on here? Why so many high-publicity crashes in this kind of airplane?

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The surprising anti-war message of '24'

Jane Mayer's article about the casually pro-torture message of '24' has gotten a lot of attention, and with reason. It's a wonderful piece of journalism that makes an important point.

But here's a less obvious side of '24' -- or, perhaps, a generally-forgotten one, just because of the passage of years.

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Dear Vice President Cheney: Shut up.

The Chinese military's destruction of one of China's own satellites last month was an unexpected, disruptive, and potentially very alarming event. Was the People's Liberation Army beating its chest and showing its potential? Was there confusion within the Chinese government -- as suggested by the several-day delay before the Foreign Ministry began answering questions about what had happened? Was this some ill-advised reverse-backflip attempt to force the United States to reenter negotiations for a treaty banning space warfare? Was this the most ominous step the Chinese government has taken in a long time? Or the most foolish? Both? No one outside the Chinese government knows at this point, and perhaps very few people inside it.

What is clear is that the worst-positioned person to scold China about its behavior is the one who just did: Vice President Dick Cheney.

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Beer in Shanghai, part 3: Sam Adams crisis is over

It makes my head hurt to think about this, but about 21.7 million containers left the port of Shanghai last year. (These are the standard 20-foot long metal boxes that go from freighter ships to railroads or trucks and are called TEUs in the trade.) On a round-the-clock basis, that's more than 59,000 TEUs per day, nearly 2500 an hour, two every three seconds. This year the port of Shanghai will send out significantly more.

I know what's in the containers as they leave. Computers. Toys. The world's supply of electric toothbrushes I saw manufactured at a nearby plant. Shoes. You name it. Rather, you buy it.

What's on the ships when they return? I don't know - actually, I'm looking into it, and it's a subject for another day. (Maybe it's dollars, to pay for all the stuff?) What I can say with relief is that the container with the spring 2007 shipment of Sam Adams beer made it safely into port. The stores that were sold out across the city last week have been resupplied. Thank you, Sam Adams company; thank you, Port of Shanghai stevedores who labored to serve the public through the Chinese New Year holiday.

That leaves only 21,699,999 containers to account for.

Am I being too rational? The prospect of war on Iran

Starting late in 2004, I have been writing that the United States could not rationally comtemplate attacking Iran. (For reasons laid out in 2004, 2006, and 2007.) Through that time I have been arguing with friends, adversaries, and people I do not know, all of whom keep saying: rational or not, it's coming!

This dispute is strange in one obvious way.

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Momentarily less sympathy for, yes, Microsoft

Microsoft's OneNote is a great little product. I know, like, and once worked at Microsoft alongside Chris Pratley, who led its development inside the company. I know, like, and have praised in public the elegance of OneNote's design and its overall usefulness.

I've been using the beta version of OneNote 2007 for a couple of months, and the time has come to pony up for the real, bona fide, for-release version. No problem: the $79.95 upgrade price is a relative bargain. (Yes, I could get it for under $1 on the street here in Shanghai, but, as noted earlier, That Would Be Wrong.) So I use the Help/Activate command from inside the program, and what do I find?

First, the online purchase program will not work with Firefox.

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Thank you, Martha Raddatz

At yesterday's news conference, Martha Raddatz of ABC finally got to ask President Bush directly the question that has been obvious since he first announced his "surge" policy one month ago. Ignore the first sentence of her question and look at what comes after that:

Q Mr. President, do you agree with the National Intelligence Estimate that we are now in a civil war in Iraq? And, also, you talk about victory, that you have to have victory in Iraq; it would be catastrophic if we didn't. You said again today that the enemy would come here, and yet you say it's not an open-ended commitment. How do you square those things?

Of course Bush didn't answer.

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Beer in Shanghai, part 2: challenge

In the last few months, in a dozen cities in mainland China plus Hong Kong, Macau, and various sites through Vietnam, I've had a chance to try a large range of Asian beers. The local mainstays around Shanghai: Tsingtao, Snow, REEB, plus the Chinese-brewed (ie, watery) versions of Carlsberg, Tiger, Heineken, Bud, Foster's, San Miguel, Asahi, Kirin, and Suntory. In the north, Harbin and some other beers I now forget. In the south, Haizhu, Kingway, and Pearl River beers. Beijing Beer and Yanjing Beer in the capital. Exotic variants like REEB DARK (ugh) and Tsingtao Light (UGH!!). In Vietnam, BGI, 333, Saigon, and Bia Larue.

Yeah, there are differences.

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Beer in Shanghai, part 1: lament

Sam Adams clean sold out at the usual-suspect supermarkets! Arrggh! At 12 kuai per 12 ounce bottle (just over $1.50), or not that much more than beer-store prices in the U.S., this was the main retail alternative to the hopeless, hopless local brews. Sure, it's six times as expensive as REEB or locally-made Tiger, but it's fifty times as good. This is a rare illustration of the "life in Shanghai"= "life in the Klondike" hypothesis, as we wait for the next shipment of provisions to arrive.

This is what I call a cultural revolution: Queuing Day in China

Yes, it would be easy to make fun of "Queuing Day." Pathetically easy. On this day, observed for the first time on February 11 in Beijing, people are supposed (gasp!) to stand in lines before getting on buses, buying tickets, paying at check-out stands, etc. From now through the Olympics, the 11th of every month will be a queuing day. The old cornball jokes come to mind: There is the yokel who takes a bath every Saturday night whether he needs it or not, and there are people who stand in line on the 11th of every month whether they need to or not. On the 12th, things are back to normal.

But actually, I find this effort at social uplift strangely touching.

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Interesting online map technology: Smart Shanghai

I'm on on record as scoffing at the silly term "mashup" and thinking that "Web 2.0" has been more impressive as a slogan than as a clearly-defined concept. Still, some of these new-fangled web sites are pretty interesting! Maps in particular -- they get better and better because of the combination (which is how you say "mashup" in English) of aerial photos, geographically-tagged information, user-supplied content, Ajax-based interactivity, and other adornments.

Recent example: this map of Shanghai, which lets you zoom in and out and arrow around, in a way that was novel when applied by Google maps; and, significantly, lets you search by street name, which is a big plus when you're getting to know a city. (You click on "Find Streets" and then choose from a drop-down list.) It doesn't zoom to a specific street address, in the fashion of Google Maps or similar applications; but it's useful in its own way.

Perhaps this kind of searchable map is already known far and wide to everyone but me. I don't know: the main other place I've seen it is on this German site. What I can say is that it was a big help this morning in figuring out how to get to an appointment on Yueyang Road.

Nobody's perfect: Gmail and spam

Spam is of course a modern blight, but until recently I thought I'd found the closest thing to a perfect solution. This was the spam filter built into Gmail. Compared with any of the other email services on which I've maintained accounts -- Yahoo, Hotmail, the Atlantic's in-house system, until recently AOL -- Gmail seemed better by both measures of anti-spam effectiveness. It had very few "false negatives" (spam it should have trapped but mistakenly let through) and virtually no "false positives" (messages I wanted to see but that it mistakenly trapped).

Or so I thought.

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APOLOGIES: Contact function has been broken for two months

Oh my. Through a trail of little clues (and thanks to Michael Goldberg of MDV in Menlo Park, who tried to contact me another way when he got no reply to a message left here), it turns out that the "contact" function on this site has not worked for at least the last two months.

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Homage where homage is due: Charles Peters

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a very nice column of tribute to Charles Peters, my original employer in the magazine world and, for me and a large number of other people in journalism, something like Chairman Mao without the starvation and mass terror. That is, an inspirational and consequential figure whose doctrine had its oddities and whose personal habits did too, but whose influence can't be ignored. Fortunately Charlie's influence, unlike the Chairman's, was overwhelmingly to the good.

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The squeegee men of Shanghai

I like China. I like Shanghai. I like most Chinese people I see and meet.

But I'm getting pretty tired of China's big-city counterpart to the squeegee men whom Rudolph Giuliani was famed for chasing off the streets of New York. Forget running for president, Rudy. Come deal with the shoe-squeegee men of Shanghai.

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It is tedious to say this again, but there is a HUGE logical problem with the Iraq policy

At President Bush's meeting with the Democratic leadership over the weekend, the following line drew applause, according to the transcript released by the White House:

And I have made it clear to the Iraqi government, just like I made it clear to the American people, our commitment is not open ended.

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Where Congress can draw the line: no war with Iran

Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard -- on the merits, and in the politics. It's hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from "surge" to "get out now" and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It's just a question of by whom and for how long. On a balance-of-misery basis, my own view changed last year from "we can't afford to leave" to "we can't afford to stay." And the whole issue is hard in its politics because even Democrats too young to remember Vietnam know that future Karl Roves will dog them for decades with accusations of "cut-and-run" and "betraying" troops unless they can get Republicans to stand with them on limiting funding and forcing the policy to change.

By comparison, Iran is easy: on the merits, in the politics. War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq. While the Congress flounders about what, exactly, it can do about Iraq, it can do something useful, while it still matters, in making clear that it will authorize no money and provide no endorsement for military action against Iran.

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Sympathy for, yes, Microsoft

As indicated earlier, I have not had a completely blissful experience trying out the pre-release versions of Windows Vista and Office2007. But I completely believe what I wrote a few months ago in the Atlantic: these are both very good products and well worth buying.

Office's improvements are immediately visible in a snazzy, elegant, fit-and-finish way. The most important changes in Vista are largely invisible internal improvements, although it also has a gee-whiz factor in its "Aero" graphics presentation system, which is notably more attractive than any previous Microsoft standard. This new feature of Vista requires (as the new Office does not) more raw horsepower than most computers bought before 2006 are likely to have, which is one of several reasons why it makes sense to buy Vista pre-installed on your next computer but not to upgrade the one you already have.

So I respect and appreciate what Microsoft has achieved -- and empathize with them after reading in today's English-language (and state-controlled) Shanghai Daily that, on the very day the software first goes on sale worldwide: "As always, Microsoft will have to battle piracy, as Vista knockoffs are already being sold on the street for 10 yuan." Ten yuan, or kuai, is about $1.30.

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How the Aussie Open will make me into a better person

As noted earlier, the just-concluded Australian Open tennis championship was the first sports event I've seen live on TV in more than six months. My enforced weaning-away from those previous idle hours moaning about the Redskins or wondering about split-times at the Tour de France is no doubt virtuous and self-improving and so on.

But here is what I learned from the one truly startling participant at the Aussie Open: not the elegant Federer nor the gutsy Serena Williams but the computerized instant-replay system for disputed line calls. For anyone who has played tennis in the past or plans to play it again, the results of this system are worth serious, life-changing contemplation.

Here is the three-part logic:

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Full State of the Union "deconstruction" now posted...

... on the Atlantic's site, here. A less artful looking, but perhaps easier to read, version begins immediately below.

Here are the big points about this speech, then some line by line comments.