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Archives for August 2003

Spotlight on Julie/Julia

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Congratulations to Julie Powell for the lengthy and well-deserved profile in today’s New York Times. For the record, I should note that I said a lot of nice things about the Julie/Julia project to the Times writer, Amanda Hesser, that did not make it into her piece, which sensibly focused on Ms. Powell, Ms. Child and the food.

And that, contrary to what the Times article says, “Salon’s blog editor” is not now nor has it ever been my title. These blogs don’t have editors, as most of you know! That’s sort of the point…

Kudos for 0wnz0red

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Cory Doctorow reports on Boing Boing that his short story “0wnz0red,” which we published here at Salon last year, has qualified for the preliminary ballot for the Nebula Awards. Since he has a better grasp of the functioning of the awards process than I do, I’ll let him explain what this means: “That means that in a couple of months, all the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America will have the opportunity to cast their preliminary vote for the piece, and if it gets enough votes, it will appear on the final ballot.” Congrats. We’re proud here.

More grist for Mill

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Every now and then I get to pull back from my managerial duties and write a full-length piece. Today in Salon you can find my essay on John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” It’s part of the series we’ve been running called “Documents of Freedom” — a look back at some of the pieces of writing and speech that form the foundation of the liberties Americans often take for granted. (Here’s the full list so far.)

David Weinberger has posted an interesting response. David raises questions about what he sees as Mill’s too-rational vision: “Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.”

I think it’s probably impossible that Mill, given who he was and how he was raised to be the Ultimate Utilitarian, could avoid seeming overly rational to us — steeped as we are in all the irrationality that followed his era, in heaps of Freud and gobs of Nietzsche and decades of 20th-century horrors that have made us justifiably suspicious of Victorian progressives’ optimism. And yet it’s also clear to me that “On Liberty” intended to expand the boundaries of that utilitarianism in what, to Mill himself at least, probably felt like profoundly non-rational ways — to encompass all of the eccentric traits and organically developed characteristics that make us individuals and that enrich the world without necessarily being useful in a way that Bentham would have recognized.

Wired’s big push

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In its heyday, Wired magazine gave the entire technology and Internet press a steady stream of wacky, outrageous material to react to. On the blog he has created to accompany his new history of Wired, “Wired: A Romance” (Andrew Leonard’s Salon review is here), Gary Wolf is posting some reminiscences and other Wired miscellany.

I have to agree with his judgment that Wired’s worst story ever was the “Push” cover story he was credited as co-author of. Wolf’s recollections of how that absurd piece of puffery came into existence is illuminating and worth reading; Wired, it seems, was even more seat-of-the-pants in its editorial process than those of us on the outside could tell. I’ll stand by my assessment of February, 1997, that the story wounded the publication’s credibility. But reading Wolf’s account, you can’t help feeling a little more charitable toward the people responsible for the open-ended, improvisatory provocation that was the Wired game. Viewed as a moment rather than a movement, it all seems a little funnier and less heinous. After all, the next three years would see far vaster corporate scams unfold — and ones with far less style.

Also, don’t miss Wolf’s riff on the hapless San Francisco Chronicle, whose book reviewer made a big fuss about Wolf’s single misspelling of a single name — only to wind up with his own review sitting under a misspelled headline.

Time off

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I’m on vacation this week as Salon slows its publishing cycle a bit. Blogging will be sporadic.