Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Adam Davidson’s piece on Ed Conard, superrich guy and author of the forthcoming book “Unintended Consequences” is worth a read for anyone who thinks about the issue of inequality in the economy. Conard’s arguments remind me why it’s important to make sure economists don’t rule the world.

I worked up this post for Latitude News on this report by NORC on theism. It purports to offer a view of belief in God around the world, but as you will see, I think it lacks the breadth of sample to say any such thing. I did find it interesting (though I personally was annoyed to see the report use waiver instead of waver). Hope you do, too.

We learn about ourselves in part from how others react to us. Those reactions usually get filtered; it’s polite to find something positive to say, and to soften critical remarks.

Journalists don’t do that. We are supposed to hold up the mirror and show you your jowls. So it was with some trepidation that Latitude News agreed to let a journalism student from Northeastern student base her final project on us.

Her report shows us what we think of ourselves. Other than calling us “tiny,” she offers little assessment of our effort. Instead, it’s all us telling her what we think. She uses links from our stories to illustrate points. She may or may not agree with what we are saying; she plays it straight. Journalists should play it straight, but when straight means telling people what your one source said, it feels like a one-sided story. Of course, it’s my side that’s being heard, so I should be happy.

i did scratch my head at one quote I gave her. Did I really say it’s better when a staff is small? Maybe I did, but I can’t remember why.

Here’s the video she shot of us talking about trying to create more conversational journalism:

Almost 20 years ago, in a fiction workshop, one of my stories centered on an artist who had just sold a painting for a million dollars. The other members of the workshop thought that was simply not believable. No artist could make that much on a painting. That critique was a minor reason why I stopped working on the piece (it was clearly going to become a novel, and I didn’t want to write a novel).

I was just reading this piece on Damien Hirst and it looks like I undershot what an artist can make by at least a zero. Maybe I should go back to that story.

I went to see Wild Swans, intrigued at a play about the Cultural Revolution, something I’d like to know more about. Plus, I like seeing world premieres.

Two friends had attended it, and gave it mixed reviews. One thought the language was stilted and awkward, and surmised that they were mimicking the propaganda of the times. The set also bothered her. It varies from a farm in rural China to the urban bustle of Beijing. At one point, the stage becomes a farm complete with dirt for hoeing. Cleaning the farm off the stage provides a natural spot for an intermission, only the play spans five acts in 90 minutes. What we get instead is a relatively long interlude that slows the flow of the play. Perhaps it also reflects something of the pace of Chinese life in the 1940s.

Though she was lukewarm on the play while seeing it, she says it has stuck with her and her husband, so rated it worth a look.

A second friend saw it and loved set and show without reservation.

I thought the set was fine, and sometimes clever, especially in its use of multimedia. The language did not bother me. perhaps it was because the entire cast is Asian, so I was not expecting a traditional American or British play. I don’t think I have ever seen a play that featured more than one Asian actor.

What struck me were the contrasts; in a play about three women, the dominant character is a man, Shou-yu, and one of unyielding principle. He is in that sense much like Sir Thomas More in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, struggling against forces larger than he is by drawing a line and saying ‘this is what makes me a man, and without my principles I am nothing.’ Only the line in this case, the cause of communism and an ideal that shared effort means shared reward equally.

Wild Swans, then, like so much of 20th century American literature, pits humans against forces they cannot control, forces that should overwhelm them. Indeed, the Communist party itself cannot control its own destiny, though the middle of the play shows it trying mightily. Each character makes choices about how they will respond to these forces. And you can draw a sense of the frustration that we sometimes see coming out of China, when orderly plans and prediction falter.

In the end, the tension builds as to whether anything can shake Shou-yu’s principles. No spoilers here. But I will note that afterwards, a random theatre-goer told his companion “it should’ve run 10 minutes longer.” Like much modern fiction, it leaves some things unresolved.

After years of covering startups, I’m working at one: Latitudenews.com. I’ve been there pretty much full time since December. I’m assigning and editing pieces like A run to save olive trees in Palestine, Michigan learns to love, lean on China, The next boom continent: Africa and Europeans thirsty for U.S. craft beers. I ‘curate’ items from the foreign press in English. I’m also learning to think about how to promote stories via social media, which is not a skill that I needed to think about in my prior editorial roles.
Today we got our first real coverage, a hopeful post from Paul Gillin’s Newspaper Death Watch. He titled it Global news with a local twist. The site has an ‘intriguing philosophy,” Paul wrote. He noted that we aim to “illustrate the local impact of far away events.”
We’ve been kicking around a catchphrase that we offer “global reporting that listens — and responds.” That aims to capture our efforts to create a conversation about stories, and infuse them with perspectives from readers around the world. What do you think of it?

Apple seems to have a worm inside it. At least, that’s the perception. It happens to any daring darling innovator. At some point, they do something that exposes them as just another craven rentseeker, sucking profits out of the market like a capitalist leech. IBM had it in the 1970s, Microsoft had it after Windows 95 (and Internet Explorer), Google’s having it now over fraudulent ads. Apple’s problem is two-fold: it claims it can’t build things in the U.S., and those companies that build for it abuse their workers, as the New York Times reported. One of the best anecdotes in the Times piece involved a last-minute change Apple wanted for the iPhone, to get rid of the plastic screen it was designed with and replace it with glass.

As the Times put it:

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Say what you want about newspapers, but the NYT piece clearly matters. In just a few days, Apple’s gone from being the company for the rest of us to being on top of the 1 percent. It didn’t help that the head of Foxconn, Apple’s major supplier of iPhones and other products (the company that employed the slave-driver foreman), chose the same weekend to call his workers “animals.” But the Foxconn gaffe was just a bit of grease for the skids. Today a search on Google News reveals more than 2,000 articles about Apple’s image problem. Erik Sherman in his column takes this damning shot at Apple:

However, the screen swap example reveals something else even more stunning. What company changes a major design at the last minute? That betrays a serious lack of managerial foresight and planning. In other words, the real reason Apple operates in China is so it can have a captive workforce in what amounts to the high-tech equivalent of a company mining town. Employees are supposed to be on-call at any hour, while earning a pittance, to make up for Apple’s mistakes.

Of course, Apple just posted spectacular financial results. And for all the noise, the Daily Beast apparently could only find 18 Twitter users giving up Apple.  I don’t have an iPhone, but I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, sitting next to it is my iPad, and off in the kitchen on the table radio is my iPod Touch. I feel uncomfortable about all these Apple products. But will I switch? Large numbers of people profess to hate Microsoft, but it remains incredibly profitable. I still have and use a Windows computer. I have an XBox Kinect, too. It is truly cool, but that doesn’t make Microsoft cool, as this Bloomberg BusinessWeek article shows.

I hope Apple gets its act together, and stops behaving like the Durham Company in “The Jungle.” But its Cool Kid  days are over. All that’s left now are profits.

At Red Herring we used to do a thing called “Fish or Cut Bait,” part restaurant review, part character assassination. We’d take some notable innovator to a fancy dinner, attempt to get them smashed and write about both (my favorite was the one with Apple legend Jean Louis Gassee, who was contemptuous and favored very nice wines). Andreas Kluth, the Economist’s Los Angeles correspondent, just had the same done to him at Zocalo Public Square.

Andreas talked about his work and his new book, Hannibal and Me, over a couple of glasses of Lateral Bordeaux. The picture wasn’t flattering, but Andreas is never dull.

The book is reviewed here and plugged here, and also given a read by the inimitable Mr. Crotchety (I confess I sometimes wonder if Mr. Crotchety is Andreas’ mouthpiece, a la Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood or Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik). It’s high on my list, which never seems to get any shorter, a consequence of knowing lots of good writers with valuable things to say.

My first freelance piece of the New Year, Why science is fragile (it’s in the Boston Globe Ideas section and may demand a subscription fee). I talked with Bob McCauley, a pioneer in the scientific study of religion, about his new book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. It’s still hard for me to believe that science is in danger, but I do get that it is a cognitive challenge.

Started my morning in bed, finishing a galley copy of Mr g,, Alan Lightman’s next novel, about the creation. Lightman’s creator is not so creative as Milton’s, so vindictive as Dante’s nor so cruel as Melville’s. Lightman’s devil is sleek and backstabbing, but in some ways more engaged in the universe and more creative than Mr g himself. Lightman is of course a much better cosmologist than his forbears, and emotionally profound in his own way. Meaning comes from the atoms, inadvertently. I’ll be mulling this book for a while.

Palantir is a contradiction of a company: started by a diehard libertarian in order to sell software to governments that has the potential to undermine civil liberties, enticing bright engineers in Silicon Valley to take jobs that lack large financial returns, uses a demo and anonymous sources to highlight its potential. still, an interesting read in Business Week: Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.

Working my way through Best American Magazine Writing 2010. The latest update to the series reminds us just how good non-fiction writing can be. This morning was a feature writing finalist, Evan Ratliff’s Vanish, an engrossing, suspenseful story of his effort to disappear for a month. See also this: How We Caught Missing Wired Writer Evan Ratliff