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A couple of links, before they get even older

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  • Do as Experts Say, Not as They Do – WSJ.com. This little piece from the Journal will break your investing heart. You know all that good advice you read from the experts about diversifying, rebalancing your portfolio on a regular schedule, not thinking you can pick stocks, and so on? It seems that the gurus dispensing this advice do not follow it themselves. Even, yikes, John Bogle, who has always struck me as one of the heros with a head on his shoulders: he says he hasn’t rebalanced his own portfolio since 2000.

  • OEDIPUS THE KING (OF THE ROAD).

    This was kicking around last month. You might’ve seen it already. I hadn’t. “Daniel Nussbaum has retold the story of Oedipus using 154 of the more than 1 million California personalized license plates registered with the state’s Motor Vehicles Bureau.” A sample:

    ONCEPON ATIME LONG AGO IN THEBES IMKING. OEDIPUS DAKING.
    LVMYMRS. LVMYKIDS. THEBENS THINK OEDDY ISCOOL. NOPROBS.
    OKAY MAYBE THEREZZ 1LITL1. MOTHER WHERERU? WHEREAT MYDAD?

    Pretty great.

From Village Voice to blogosphere

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Louis Menand’s account of the early history of the Village Voice in this week’s New Yorker concludes with the following observation:

More than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere — whose motto might be “Every man his own Norman Mailer” — and Craigslist fifty years before their time. The Voice also helped to create the romance of the journalistic vocation by making journalism seem a calling, a means of self-expression, a creative medium.

Menand has it about half-right, I’d say. What was blogospheric about the Voice? For one thing, the way its writers were free to speak their minds, and to squabble with each other in public, in the pages of their own publication. These spats were part of the theater of the thing, and other publications looked down their noses at them. Also, decades before the term “MSM” had been coined, the Voice (in its Press Clips column) pioneered the sort of aggressive take-down of conventional journalism’s missteps that’s a blogging staple today.

But the Voice plainly wasn’t the blogosphere. It was too small, for one thing, too parochial. It did only a tiny bit of “what the Internet does” today, in terms of both quantity and variety. It was a newspaper: Its writers got paid, and there were editors, and you had to send them clips and a resume if you wanted your stuff published.

That’s what I did. As a young freelance journalist fresh out of college, I got my first break, my first pro byline, from M. Mark at the Voice’s book review section. She liked a piece I submitted — not well enough to run it, but enough to toss me a book to review. It was an experience I remain thankful for. But it had absolutely no similarity to what I’d do if I were 22 today, with the opportunity to publish open in my browser.

Menand is right, though, about the romance part. The belief that the form of journalism could stretch to contain a far wider spectrum of creative self-expression than the newsroom oldtimers were attempting incubated at the Voice. I inherited it from my college-newspaper mentors and carried it through my career. In the 1970s and ’80s this approach still had a renegade quality; today it is pretty much the norm, from blogs to the New York Times.

Can conservatives report?

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Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:

What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.

I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)

But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?

Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.

UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.

Times trips over COBRA

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This morning I read the New York Times’ front-page piece about Obama’s stimulus plan, and nearly spat out my coffee as I read this passage near the top of the piece:

Other policy changes would subsidize employers’ expenses for temporarily continuing health insurance coverage to laid-off and retired workers and their dependents, as mandated under a 22-year-old federal law known as Cobra.

I first learned about COBRA as an editor/manager over the last decade, and learned all about it from the other side more recently, as one of the large number of Americans who have resorted to it over the past year. I guess the article’s authors, Jackie Calmes and Carl Hulse, have never had to deal with COBRA up close themselves. If they did, they’d know that employers don’t have many expenses associated with COBRA. COBRA simply allows employees who have lost their health insurance coverage (because they were laid off or they no longer qualify because, say, their hours were cut back) to keep their existing insurance for up to 18 months. All they have to do is pay the entire cost of the health insurance themselves — whatever portion they used to pay themselves, and the (typically) larger portion that their employers used to pay.

So what kind of assistance do employers need to cover COBRA costs? Maybe they have some minor administrative overhead. But surely they’re not the parties who need help in this situation.

There are two possible explanations here: Either the Obama team has suddenly lost all of its marbles, or the Times reporters mangled their description of the Obama plan — which, perhaps, might involve covering the employees’ costs for the COBRA insurance (possibly by paying into the employers’ plan, which might explain the confusion).

I checked the Times site at the end of the day, expecting to find a correction on the article, but there’s none there as I write this.

Holman Jenkins: “lost decade” or lost mind?

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I continue to read the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and columnists in a “know thy enemy” mode. As the recent economic crises have pretty much razed the paper’s entire stable of totems, it has been fun to watch the rhetorical writhings. Mostly, they speak for themselves. But I think I cannot let this Christmas-eve gem from Holman Jenkins pass without comment. I think it will prove representative of the sort of hilarity we can expect to read from unrepentant free-marketeers over the coming year.

Here’s a shorter Jenkins:

(1) Since we only had one Great Depression, we can’t really draw any lessons from it, because we never got to run the experiment twice. We have no evidence that government spending helped end the Depression, or that more spending would have ended it faster.

(2) Despite said inability to draw lessons from the Great Depression, we do know — thanks to “plenty of evidence from history” — that “actions hostile to business tend to be related to an absence of prosperity.” Therefore people who argue that in the 1930s the “government did not do enough to restore business confidence, or did too much to damage it, piling on taxes, regulation and labor unions” are on “firmer ground” than advocates of government spending.

(3) But never mind these lessons from the Great Depression, because we live in a democracy, and democracies in general can’t be trusted with something as important as an economy. Give the people power and they will inevitably make bad policy.

(4) Sometimes democracies somehow stumble into periods of prosperity anyway, and when they do, this prosperity is “self-reinforcing” because “powerful interests” become powerful enough to resist all that bad policy that a democracy might wish to promulgate.

(5) These periods of prosperity do not last forever, and “once prosperity blows up” the same “self-reinforcing cycle” becomes “an unvirtuous one,” and instead of “powerful [business] interests” promoting prosperity, we get democratic governments promoting “costly or vindictive wish lists.”

(6) Government bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s extreme measures “may in retrospect be seen as just the right medicine. At the moment, no rational investor or business manager looks upon such doings with confidence in our economic future.”

(7) “Bottom line: Politics is in charge — in a way that makes a lost decade of subpar prosperity more likely than not.”

Jenkins’ account of recent events displays the sort of hermetic reality avoidance once only observable in unreconstructed Stalinists. Government must keep its hands off business! We can only trust the unfettered corporation to maintain a virtuous cycle of prosperity! When prosperity “blows up,” we can only trust the same “powerful” business interests to restore it! Don’t ever sully your analysis by asking how it was that your business-driven prosperity “blew up” in the first place. And once the blow-up happens, and people start asking why government didn’t restrain business from wrecking the economy in the first place, turn around and hold government responsible for the coming “lost decade.”

It is entirely possible that we are headed for a “lost decade of subpar prosperity.” But if that is the case, it is hardly excessive government meddling that is at fault, but rather the very philosophy that Jenkins espouses — of leaving our prosperity in the hands of powerful business interests unchecked by effective public oversight.

The good news is that people like Jenkins have next to no influence in the new administration. The bad news is they still have a platform in one of the nation’s two most influential newspapers.

New York vs. Northern California

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This is the time of year when I realize anew why I am here. I’m not having a spiritual experience. “Here” is the Bay Area, and as we approach the shortest day of the year and face some of the coldest days as well, I renew my delight in my home for the past two decades and more.

Over on Twitter Anil Dash wrote the following yesterday:

As we landed at JFK, the woman in front of me offered, “Northern California is nice, but there’s no sense of urgency. It’s nice to be home.

I can’t tell from the Twitter-speed typing, which annihilates niceties of punctuation, whether the “it’s nice to be home” was overheard, or Anil’s own sentiment. Either way, I share the feeling, but in the opposite direction, each time I return home from an East Coast trip.

When I left my native New York in the 1980s for San Francisco, people told me similar things. “You’ll never really work hard again.” “Enjoy your long vacation.” I never saw or experienced this ostensible Northern Californian slack. I feel plenty of “urgency” here, but it is a pressure I have chosen myself. I worked harder than ever before in my life once I moved here, and continue to, partly because I’m inspired to do so, partly because I do not spend five months of the year in a state of physical misery and mental dejection brought on by extreme cold, light deprivation and aggressively desiccating indoor heating.

Having grown up in Queens and spent the first two decades of my life in the five boroughs, I have certain aspects of New York imprinted in my genes or upon my neurons, including a contempt for wimpy bagels, a disdain for outlandish pizza toppings and a fairly complete knowledge of the subway system rendered only slightly archaic by service changes (c’mon, what’s with this “Z” and “V” lines?). I *heart* NY as much as anyone. But, perhaps because it’s where I spent my youth, I’ve never felt a personal need to prove myself by taking it on as a challenge. I will be perfectly content without ever making it to Page Six (or even Gawker), and the city, of course, will do just fine without me.

One of my chief reasons for not regretting a move away from New York was my sense, in the mid-1980s, that it was a city where money loomed too large as a motivator, a totem and a measure of human value. I was hoping to plant myself in an environment that left at least the possibility of seeing my own life through other lenses. In the ’80s I thought that the ambient greed of New York might be merely a Reagan-era aberration. But subsequent years and decades only accentuated this aspect of the city’s place in the world. New York had long ago stopped making much of anything except money, but it thrived as the epicenter for America’s financial-engineering prowess.

2008 put a definitive end to that. With the collapse of Wall Street’s investment banks, the implosion of the markets and now the revelation of outright fraud on almost inconceivable levels ($50 billion? isn’t that more like a state budget than an investment portfolio?), it seems that New York’s run as the world’s financial capital is at an end. For the foreseeable future, it appears that Washington will be calling the shots in the U.S. economy.

However inconsistent with capitalist doctrine this change may be, it’s hard to complain, given how poorly the New York financiers managed things. But it makes me wonder: what will New York focus on next? There’s too much brains, energy and determination in the city for it to sit on its hands. I think that, now that the dollar is no longer so almighty, a lot of people are going to need to find something else to drive their lives.

Disappearing DC bureaus? Boo-hoo!

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Front page NY Times piece today laments the general downsizing of Washington bureaus by papers and chains. On the one hand, any time some writer loses a job, it’s a shame. But we can acknowledge that human price and still question the assumptions behind the more general professional garment-rending.

Before we worried about the rising tide of unemployed journalists, we had a word for the sort of journalism too many of the folks inside the old DC bureaus did: pack journalism. This was not a term of endearment. The pack members mostly asked the same questions, arrived at a general consensus, and shook their heads in sync when somebody broke ranks. It was this same pack that went nuts over the Lewinsky story and failed to understand that the American people did not want to see their president impeached for a peccadillo, and never did. It was this same pack that served (with a handful of honorable exceptions) as stenographers for the Bush administration’s faulty intelligence and accomplices in the rush into a misbegotten war in Iraq.

In the Times piece, Andy Alexander, the retiring chief of Cox’s DC bureau, which is being eliminated, says, “I think the cop is leaving the beat here.” Too often, alas, the cop was either asleep or on the take.

I do not think it is coincidental that the old DC bureaus are being downsized at the same time that we are welcoming a new presidential administration that, as this Times magazine piece reports, does not feel obligated to give interviews to reporters simply because those reporters show up at cocktail parties. A cocktail-party invitation should not be the entree to asking questions of the government. Maybe paying to keep reporters in the capital so they can go to cocktail parties is not a good use of dwindling journalistic resources. If the DC cocktail party circuit is dead — and I doubt that’s actually the case — it can only mean good things for our democracy.

Of course we need reporters in the capital to dig into complex stories and ask hard questions. But do we need hundreds of them all doing the same job, covering the same stories? How many times do we need reporters to repeat the same question, like “Why haven’t you released your internal report on contacts with Blagojevich?” when the question has already been reasonably answered? If many of these bureaus are being replaced by coverage from niche publications that have more specialized focuses, maybe that is something to cheer — a more sensible division of labor.

Henry Blodget isn’t shedding tears, either. But he does acknowledge that the elimination of local papers’ DC bureaus might reduce coverage of the local communities’ concerns and representatives in the capital.

I think we probably will have a gap there for a while, and that’s not good. But it’s not a national disaster. Eventually, the local Web sites will pick up the slack. They may not be able to send reporters fulltime to DC. They’ll miss the cocktail parties. But they’ll still be able to cover the stories that matter to them.

UPDATE: John McQuaid suggests Blodget’s being cavalier, wonders who will dig through all the new data Obama’s “transparency” promise will provide.

Appearances elsewhere (NOOP.nl, Fray)

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Item one: Jurgen Appelo was kind enough to include Dreaming in Code earlier this year in his Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books Ever. (Top 100 and best ever! Yow!) When he came back to me and asked me to do one of his “Five Easy Questions For…” interviews, how could I refuse?

Here is the result, in which I talk about, among other things, my early days as a freelancer, what inspires me to keep writing, and what is more interesting than software development.

Item two: Earlier this year, while I was deeply immersed in work on the new book, Derek Powazek asked if I’d contribute to Fray, his labor-of-love magazine — yes, a paper magazine, it’s a thing of beauty. The sensible thing to do would have been to beg off, and I was going to. But the topic of the issue was going to be “Geek: True Stories of People Taking Things Too Seriously,” and as I plowed through my book work I found my mind drifting back to my youth, and a time when I was a true geek, not for software or Tolkien or theater or politics or any of the other things I have geeked out on over the years, but for tropical fish — which was, for me, the ur-geekly pursuit.

So I wrote a little piece, titled Memories of a Fickle God, about those times. It’s online here, along with a bunch of far more captivating pieces.

But really, if you’re interested in this stuff, the thing to do is to buy the magazine (or subscribe), because it’s full of great stories and beautiful art. This is the future of the print magazine: once the profits have all migrated elsewhere, people will still publish on paper. But they’ll do it for their own damn reasons.

aquaristsmall

Friends’ books: Laura Miller, Mike Sragow tomes

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I want to note new books released by two friends and former colleagues, both of which are just out, neither of which I have yet read, both of which I am fully expecting to delight in.

Readers of Salon and the New York Times Book Review know Laura Miller’s critical writing by its wisdom, range, power and clarity. Her new book, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, is her first (she also edited Salon’s Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors). It’s an unusual combination of personal memoir and literary criticism that is about, among other things, Narnia, childhood imagination, memory and the power of stories. I was always more of a Tolkien guy than a Narnian; I think by the time I got to Lewis’s books their Christian subtexts did not look “sub” at all to me, and I found the whole thing an exercise in crude allegory. But if anyone can make me understand their power, I imagine it will be Laura. If you read this excerpt from the book recently posted at Salon, you’ll see why. (Here’s Laura’s website for the book.)

My professional path has crossed multiple times with Mike Sragow’s: He’s now the movie critic for the Baltimore Sun. When I met him he was the movie critic and editor for the Boston Phoenix, where he encouraged me to write about movies (I’d limited myself to theater and books). Then we worked together at the SF Examiner, and again at Salon. For me, he has always been the best kind of mentor; for his readers, he has always been an incisive, insightful and deeply knowledgeable critic.

Mike’s new book, his first (he also edited a couple of anthologies for the National Society of Film Critics), is Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master — a biography of the director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, whose reputation and swashbuckling life story have long been neglected. Here’s a Wall Street Journal review by Peter Bogdanovich, who calls the book “evocative, layered, engaged, graceful and compelling”; here’s another review of it from today’s N.Y. Times.

I can’t wait to read both of these books — soon as I’m done poring over edits on my own…

Richard Thompson’s work songs

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For the past few years I have been making a pilgrimage to Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, through what are inevitably cold December rains, for solo acoustic shows by Richard Thompson. (I wrote about the trip back in 2005.) This year I picked up tickets way in advance for a Sunday evening show, figuring the traffic would be lighter than on a week night. Only later was this night declared on the calendar to be a special “theme” night, billed as a “first time ever” event: Thompson would perform “Work Songs, Ballads and Rallying Cries.” A little like his show of “1000 Years of Popular Music,” the set ranged from Renaissance ballads to punk. It was a bit rough around the edges, a rarity for this supremely skilled guitarist, but utterly engaging, and repeatedly surprising.

The show opened with Thompson’s own stirring “Time to Ring Some Changes,” and included several songs from his album “Industry,” one from his “Hard Cash” collection, and “Genesis Hall,” his Fairport Convention classic. The rest were covers — and what an eclectic collection.

I’m probably forgetting a few, but here’s what I remember: “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”; “Minority” (Green Day); “Joshua Gone Barbados” (Rick von Schmidt); “Strange Fruit”; a hilarious 18th century song about lying, cheating merchants; a solemn, stirring anthem of the Diggers, that brief-lived collective during the English Revolution; “Get Up, Stand Up” (Bob Marley — minus the lines about Haile Selassie); “War” (Edwin Starr/Temptations); “I Ain’t Marching Any More” (Phil Ochs); “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds); “Beds Are Burning” (Midnight Oil). Harmonica player George Galt accompanied on several numbers.

Thompson added a couple of updated verses to the Ochs march, placed his own spooky spin on “War,” and busted loose like a one-man rock band for the Midnight Oil number. Beyond an opening crack about the late conversion of George W. Bush to socialism, he barely alluded to the current state of the world and the woes of the economy. He really didn’t have to.