Relevant History

Taleb the Improbable

"I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event. I just don't know what that event will be." (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, p. 154)

Cass Sunstein on deliberation and extremism

It's conventional wisdom that groups generate ideas and plans more moderate than those of individuals. Groups and discussion encourage compromise, smooth out extremes, and guarantee moderation. It is also one of the unspoken assumptions of facilitation and group-oriented scenario work. Facilitation and scenario-building, the thinking goes, builds a sense of collective spirit by helping groups develop a shared vision of the future.

But Cass Sunstein's new book, Going to Extremes, challenges these assumptions. As Slate's Christopher Caldwell explains in a review,

Going to Extremes... finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the "extreme" strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more "extreme" monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn't necessarily wrong. But it doesn't lead reliably to moderation, either....

Much of Sunstein's evidence about how people drift to extremes comes from his studies of groups that already have a bias to begin with. Individual Democrats and Republicans on three-judge panels cast more "extreme" votes when they are in the majority than when they are not. A group of conservative Republicans in Colorado Springs will move sharply rightward when they discuss global warming among themselves, and a group of liberal Democrats from Boulder will move sharply leftward.

These homogeneous groups are not the special cases they would appear. They tell us something about what happens in more heterogeneous groups, too. If you bring the two clashing sides together, they don't find middle ground any more than like-minded people do. Each side digs in. If you give "a set of balanced, substantive readings" to a group that is at loggerheads over abortion or affirmative action, Sunstein shows, each side simply mines the readings for support of its own position. Ideology, it turns out, is not just a matter of opinions or positions—it is a predisposition to receive some kinds of evidence and not others. Compounding the problem, certain kinds of extremist arguments have an "automatic rhetorical advantage" in deliberation. Me, too, but less is harder to rally behind than In for a penny, in for a pound.

The question this raises is whether the facilitation methods that futurists use tend to encourage moderation, or exacerbate this problem. Do scenarios tend to force people to think together, and recognize that complex issues can't be solved through simple means? Or does the intellectual and imaginative freedom that thinking about the future provides encourage groups to project their own extremes?

Add this to the list of insights from psychology-- along with the work of Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahnemann, Philip Tetlock, et al-- that futurists need to consider when thinking about how to improve their work.

Pet Schrodinger's Kitty

This mashup of Pat the Bunny and a physics textbook is really brilliant. I've finally found the perfect children's gift for all my friends! (Though it doesn't look like it comes with an Enrico Fermi stuffie, alas.)

Idle Words on Kundera and dating

Maciej Ceglowski, creator of Wrong Tomorrow (our motto: time vs. pundits), may be my new favorite writer. Here he is on Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being:

One of the terrors of dating is Milan Kundera, and specifically, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the sexually-transmitted book that this Czech-born author has inflicted on a generation of American youth.

I fully recognize the important role of the dating book, that is, the carefully selected work you lend a prospective lover sometime in the golden honeymoon period between your second cup of coffee together and the first time you spend a night in the same bed without touching. In that short window of time, your partner is still a delicious mystery to you, an enigmatic and discerning being, and to her you are a dark continent of adventure and excitement, waiting to be explored. And so you lend her books that are funny, playful, and good subway reading, but also complex enough to hint at your Hidden Depths. Something unusual is a plus, as are lots of sexy bits, to serve as a reminder of the animal fires that burn within. And since you don't yet know one another too well, you try to choose a shotgun of a book that fires a wide pattern, thematically speaking. Like an early physicist studying the atom, you will hurl little bits of culture at your new love and collect valuable data about her inner life by observing the way they bounce off.

Given these requirements, it's not surprising that many people have gravitated towards The Unbearable Lightness of Being.... The problem, though, is that The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a really bad book. Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book.

The idea of new people being like atoms at the Cavendish, to be understood through indirect and oblique probes (Ernest Rutherford was widely acknowledged as the sexiest of the early 20th century's experimental physicists); the Dave Matthews comparison; the assault on a book so well-regarded that Daniel Day-Lewis was in the movie. Gold.

Actually, Wrong Tomorrow would be a great motto for a futurist: "Right Today, Wrong Tomorrow."

Building my new home office

Since we moved into our house in 2001, we've used part of the garage as a home office. Actually, functionally speaking much of the house is a home office at one time or another, but my desk and books are in the garage. Some of my books, at least: I've long had more books than is good for me, and not enough space for them, so at least half of them have been in a storage shed or the Institute. (An occupational hazard: my father and stepmother have a two-story octagonal library in their house, and have also filled the basement with books!)

I've long dreamed of having enough space for all my books. A couple weekends ago, we went to Ikea and bought some shelving. We bought it right before I went to Europe, so we didn't get it assembled before I left; but on Saturday we got it built. Finally, I've got space for all my books. I've got to put two rows on each of the shelves, but I've had to do that since Berkeley, so I'm used to it.

my daughter alphabetizing books, via flickr

So now I have bookcases and working space on three sides: the armoire, the new tall bookcases beside those, and the short white bookcases forming the other arm of the U. Heaven.

my son in my new intellectual control center, via flickr

I'll spend the next few days happily alphabetizing the books, then figuring out the ideal way to arrange them around me. Actually, I'm not likely to ever find an ideal system; I'll keep reorganizing them forever, as projects come and go.

Update: A Finnish friend informs me that the design for the Ikea bookcases I just bought is, shall we say, an homage to bookcases long sold by a Finnish company, Lundia. Their Web site doesn't seem to have an English section, but their designs-- particularly their chairs-- look edgier than most Ikea furniture these days. Maybe the difference is that Ikea design, for all its Swedish origins, is now a generic global modern, manufactured in and designed to appeal to buyers in China and Copenhagen alike, while Lundia's is more purely Finnish.

ikea, menlo park, office, work

Spies of Warsaw

Last night I finished the new Alan Furst book, The Spies of Warsaw. Furst is one of my favorite living authors: I choose his books as dinner companions when I travel, and his work is something of a reference point for me. (For those who don't know Furst and his work, this is still a good introduction.)

I thought his last book, The Foreign Correspondent, was very entertaining, but had a bit too much of familiar characters and places for my taste. The problem is that Furst has built up a remarkably rich fictional universe-- imagine JRR Tolkien or Terry Pratchett without magic-- in which places have a lot of resonance and meaning, and part of the pleasure of reading his work is learning more about it. Imagine going to a city you already like and discovering a new cool neighborhood, another excellent restaurant, and becoming a bit more comfortable with the subway: a trip in which you see only familiar sights can be very nice, but lack the pleasure of surprise. (Now that I think about it, the books of his that I reread the least, Dark Voyage and Blood of Victory, take place on the periphery of that world-- maybe too far.) So the challenge is to keep expanding that universe, while throwing new light on the familiar parts of it.

Spies of Warsaw manages to hit a very nice balance between familiarity and novelty. There are a couple secondary characters who we meet originally in The Polish Officer or The World at Night, whose back-stories are fleshed out. The main characters are new, and most of the action takes place in Warsaw (where Furst's earlier books haven't spent much time), or Germany; Paris makes an appearance, but it isn't as big a character as it is in some of his other books.

The stakes are also clearer and higher in this book. Without giving too much away, the central character becomes aware that the Wehrmacht is trying to figure out how to conduct blitzkrieg operations through forests-- which suggests that Germany is going to try to attack France not by throwing itself against the Maginot Line, but by going through the Ardennes. Normally, Furst's characters risk their lives for very uncertain stakes: unless they're trying to save a loved one, they rarely know if the operations they're involved in will make any difference at all to the war. (The recycling of Furst's characters runs the risk of making World War II seem like something that was fought by about fifty people; but having his characters operate in worlds that have completely uncertain, and often very ambiguous, outcomes helps create a sense that you're watching just one of a million little parts of the war, not the central figures whose actions secretly determine the course of the war.) They're also more war-weary in this book. Maybe it's because several of the are French veterans of the trenches of World War I; or maybe it's harder to write a book about war these days without thinking that your characters would be more scarred, and simultaneously more hardened and fearful.

Furst has to write a book set mainly in Budapest now.

Alan Furst, reading

The decline of the public intellectual, revisited

20 years ago, Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals, on the rise and fall of the public intellectual in 20th-century America. He has an op-ed piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that reviews the book, public (or at least academic) reaction to it, and how the argument has stood up.

The piece is worth reading, if only because it nicely lays out his argument:

I offered a generational explanation for what I saw as the eclipse of younger intellectuals. Why in 1987 had the same intellectuals dominated for more than 20 years, with few new faces among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academization appeared to be the reason. Younger intellectuals were retreating into specialized and cloistered environments.

Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia.

Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious 60s cohort, do give interviews; do write articles on demand; and most evidently do participate in symposia. They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation — my generation! — advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile.

The book is still well worth reading, I think.

[To the tune of Bill Evans Trio, "What Is This Thing Called Love?," from the album "Portrait in Jazz".]

Best book review ever?

"Reading this book is like watching a flaming piano fall out of an airplane and land in a puppy farm." (Sadly, No! on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism)

[To the tune of Jimi Hendrix, "House Burning Down," from the album "The Essential Jimi Hendrix (Disc 2)".]

New review

My review of Stuart Clark's The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began is in the latest issue of American Scientist.

It was a good book, but to be perfectly honest, it was one of those reviews that the editor took apart, rearranged, and greatly improved. So equal credit on this one should go to Flora Lewis.

Thanks to Bill C. for letting me know it was out!

[ Posted from Caffe Espresso 1929 via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: astronomy, books, history, history of science, science

Next thing to read

Now that I'm almost finished with Terry Pratchett's Making Money, I need something else to read: Squidpunk!

SQUIDPUNK: THE MANIFESTO

Fiction that unlike New Weird, Steampunk, or Slipstream, is at its core not only about squid, but about the symbolism of squid as color-changing, highly-mobile, alien-looking, intelligent ocean-goers. As a powerful ecosystem indicator, the squid is a potent symbol for environmental rejuvenation. Squidpunk is almost exclusively set at sea and must contain some reference to either cephalopods or to anything that thematically relates to squid, in terms of world iconography and tropes. Squidpunk is never escapist or whimsical. It is always serious and edgy. This combination of a hard punk aesthetic with the fluid propulsion system common to the squid has produced a unique literary hybrid beloved by Mundanes and Surrealists alike.

Actually, Jaron Lanier and Bruce Schneier would love it. [Via Pharyngula]

[To the tune of Russ Ballard, "Voices," from the album "Anthology".]

Technorati Tags: books, science_fiction

Liveblogging Harry Potter in England

My wife is now on her way from Cambridge to Hamburg, to spend the weekend with friends before flying home next week. Before she left, though, she got copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Apparently, it was quite the scene.

Most of the people here seem to be adults and teen-age girls.  There are a few little kids, some look under 10, and I am not quite sure what the point of that is, although the fellow who just came by had a brilliant Harry Potter costume on, he looked just like the young Harry Potter – but should he be up this late getting the last book?

It should be no surprise that many adults have academic robes to use for this in Cambridge.  What is a surprise is how many children have them.  Did they get them just for this?

The family that dresses up together, stays together

[There's] a large group of very small boys, they look they are like they can’t be older than 8.  They are dressed as a Quidditch team, they look very cute, but they will be so tired tomorrow.

12:50.... I walked past Waterstones. The line went out the door, and all the way down the street past the gates to Sidney Sussex College.  It was amazing.

Also, one of the exchange programs had a bunch of students who wanted copies, but the program has a strict curfew; so they agreed to send some of the tutors out to buy copies for all the kids, and bring them back to the college.

I really need to reread volume 6 before too long. I hardly remember any of it.

[To the tune of Keith Jarrett, "Vienna, Pt. 1," from the album "Vienna Concert".]

Technorati Tags: books, Cambridge, England, Harry Potter, travel

The Terror

A few days ago, I got Dan Simmons' new book, The Terror: A Novel. It's based on the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, which set out from England in 1845 in search of the fabled North-West Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Despite having two of the better cold-weather ships in the Royal Navy, and years of provisions, the party disappeared into the Arctic. The ships were trapped in ice, Franklin himself died, and after two years, the ships were abandoned. So far as we know, all 120-odd members of the expedition died.

Nothing was ever heard from the expeditions (by Europeans, anyway-- apparently, the ships were almost a tourist attraction for the Inuit, and David Woodman's Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony gathers voluminous material documenting local knowledge of the expedition), which makes it a great platform for an historical thriller. And when one of the ships is actually called Terror (the other was Erebus), it's inevitable that someone writes about them.

I find much of Simmons' work quite compelling, both in an emotional sense-- reading Song of Kali made for a very disturbing afternoon-- and an intellectual one-- his Ilium and Olympos, which replay the Homeric epics on Mars, on the base of Mount Olympus (with a big dose of The Tempest stirred in), are wonderfully audacious. (Imagine Steven King rewriting the Old Testament, with an emphasis on all the really gory stuff.) The Terror is a bit like The Difference Engine or Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, in that all begin with real historical events and people, but then spin off into these weird alternate universes.

Some of the books' recurring themes are a bit disturbing. A few of Simmons' books have, shall we say, a complicated relationship with Catholicism. Characters you spend a lot of time with have a way of getting horribly mutilated or killed. The societies he conjures are defined principally by their relationships with some awful monster or threat: to paraphrase Freud, the discontents of the civilizations in Simmons' books tend to be things that decapitate their victims before sucking the still-warm marrow out of their bones. The result is a world-view that's equal parts Thomas Hobbes and H. P. Lovecraft.

Still, Simmons is unquestionably a brilliant writer, and I have to respect anyone who thinks on such a big scale.

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Sonate no. 22 op. 54 in f gr.t., ," from the album "Piano Sonatas Vol. 2".]

Technorati Tags: science_fiction

Today is Towel Day

I didn't realize, but it's Towel Day:

Towel Day is a day when you carry around a towel all day to commemorate the late, great Douglas Adams, author of the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[To the tune of Earth, Wind & Fire, "Can't Hide Love," from the album "Earth Wind & Fire: Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: books, science_fiction

Wintersmith

My daughter and I just started Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith, the third in his series of young adult novels featuring witch-in-training Tiffany Aching. We'd already read The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, the first two books about Tiffany, and my daughter enjoyed them both.

At first, she mainly enjoyed the Nac Mac Feegle, creatures who are a cross between fairies and the Mark Wahlberg character in The Departed, with heavy Scottish accents thrown in for good measure. She still likes them, as do I; but I think she's also becoming much more interested in the character of Tiffany, and her development. I love the Feegle, but Tiffany is the most interesting character Pratchett has created since Sam Vimes, the policeman who figures prominently in a number of the Discworld books.

Doubtless there are groups who decry the books as Bad For Children, but in Pratchett's world, witchcraft is about 5% supernatural, and 95% work, responsibility and social networking. The witches who dress like Stevie Nicks ca. 1978 and spend lots of time on the occult are always bested by the witches who wear boots and listen carefully to village gossip. So in the long run, I think reading the books probably drives down the odds of girls eventually joining a coven or getting into wiccan.

And for me, reading these books is a pleasure because Pratchett is one of my favorite authors, and one of the few I'm likely to be able to share with my children. He's a real pleasure to read aloud, and it'll be years before my daughter is old enough to read Alan Furst or William Gibson (much less Neal Stephenson or Dan Simmons). For the forseeable future, Pratchett will be a common literary reference point for us, and a genuinely literary one: you don't read a Discworld novel with the movie adaptation superimposed on your imagination, as you do when you pick up a J. K Rowling book.

[To the tune of Elton John, "Crocodile Rock," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: Discworld, science_fiction, Terry Practchett

Britannica Firefox search plugin

At long last, there's a Britannica Firefox search plugin. Good for them.

On the other hand, Britannica's short contributor biographies used to note when the author had died; those notes have been taken out. Granted, encyclopedias like to think of themselves as existing in a kind of timeless, Platonic dimension of Truth, and writing for Britannica is a form of literary immortality. But noting whether an author had passed on to the Great Library in the Sky used to provide a rough sense of how old the article was; and the only reason to remove the notation is to take away that measure. And the only reason to do that is to make it harder to figure out how old (and perhaps how out of date) an article might be.

I understand the instinct, but when it's so easy to find information about just about anyone, and when every Wikipedia article carries a nauseating amount of metadata, it's a dumb thing to do.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia

Literature and habits

While I was soaking in the bath, I realized something: I've gotten into the habit of taking long, hot baths when I travel, largely because at the beginning of Alan Furst's Kingdom of Shadows, the main character, the Hungarian Nicholas Morath (traveling under a diplomatic passport), has a long soak in his girlfriend's tub after returning to Paris from a trip to Budapest.

How many habits do we have that are partly literary references? When I go hang out and work in cafes, I often think of a line in Point Counterpoint in which a character is described as renting a cafe table for the price of tea and a sticky bun. I wonder if there are others.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney & Wings, "The Long And Winding Road," from the album "Wings Over America (Disc 1)".]

Technorati Tags: Alan Furst, travel

Buckley up

Christopher Buckley is one of my favorite writers. Having gone to college on a scholarship from tobacco giant Philip Morris, Thank You for Smoking, Buckley's story of moral triangulation and defense of the rights of minors to get lung cancer, really spoke to me. His review of Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor (his Japanese characters aren't "one dimensional, they're half dimensional") was a work of genius.

So naturally his essay in Washington Monthly is really great.

[To the tune of Gipsy Kings, "Hotel California (Spanish Mix)," from the album "¡Volare! - The Very Best of the Gipsy Kings".]

The Foreign Correspondent

This morning I finished reading Alan Furst's latest book, The Foreign Correspondent. Furst is one of my all-time favorite writers (along with Terry Pratchett), and so when I was packing for the trip, his new book was an obvious thing to take along.

I discovered Alan Furst a couple years ago in the Penn bookstore, when I was in Philadelphia for a conference, and needed something to read in the evening. The covers caught my eye, and I bought The World at Night and The Polish Officer more or less on a whim, and I still reread both. I often travel with one of his books now: they're easy to slip into, and just the thing to read when I'm having dinner at some cool Polish restaurant in London, or soaking in the tub at the end of the day.

For those who don't know him, Furst's novels are all set in Europe, in the 1930s and early 1940s. He rarely ventures past 1942 or so, in part because the outcome of the war was still uncertain then, and Furst's novels are studies in decent but not superheroic people-- journalists, petty nobility, tramp steamer captains, waiters-- trying to keep their balance in universes defined by uncertainty. Often they're on the losing side of the struggle against fascism-- they're emigres who've been lucky enough to make it to Paris, or officers or diplomats from the smaller countries unlucky enough to be located between Germany and Russia-- and are forced by circumstances into intelligence work. The personal is political, as they say.

But while all of them eventually end up covertly fighting the Axis, none of them ever is responsible for the key act that turns the tide in World War II: they smuggle weapons, carry secret plans, do the occasional exfitration or rescue, but it's often not clear what difference their actions make. In part, the struggle itself is the point in Furst's books; but I think he also is making the point that modern history, and especially a titanic event like World War II, doesn't boil down to such turning-points. Total war pits economies and societies against each other, and his characters are but small cogs in those machines. At first I found this confusing, and a bit irritating; now, however, I find it completely convincing, and rather like the fact that the reader has to share the character's confusion about whether the tide will turn, and their sacrifices will matter.

If Furst's characters never really know whether whatever you've risked your life to do makes a difference to the war, however, you (the reader) know that sooner or later, they're going to end up in Paris, in one or another setting familiar from one of the earlier books. Furst clearly loves Paris; he can't stop writing about it. Most of The Foreign Correspondent takes place there, in the tangled world of Italian emigres and anti-fascist exiles. Paris is at once the City of Lights that beckons to everyone, and a thousand little mutually exclusive worlds of Balkan emigres and exiles, Soviet emigres, Polish emgires, etc etc. It's at once universal (both in its attractions and irritations) and highly particular. But after about ten books covering the same territory, he's now created a whole little alternative Paris-- or rather, a real Paris with an extra layer of fiction on top-- I can understand why he wouldn't want to tear it up.

The recycling of characters is a bit more problematic. Almost every new book now includes cameos by characters who were in earlier books. In the earlier books, this made a lot of sense, because it gave Furst a chance to fill in back-stories; but now I have mixed feelings about it. In The Foreign Correspondent, Carlo Weisz spends an evening with several people who were central in The World at Night and Dark Star; it's not a bad or unbelievable scene (Furst specializes in characters who travel in very wide circles, so it's not surprising that people from different books would meet up), but you learn nothing new about Nicholas Morath or Andre Szara or anyone else, and you do have to put up with the story of the bullet-hole in the mirror behind Table 14 yet again.

This particularly is a shame because there are some characters-- major ones like Count von Polyani, and minor ones like Lady Angela Hope-- who are fascinating and opaque, and could do with some fleshing out. If these scenes revealed a new aspect of a familiar character, they'd be very cool; but often they feel more like attempts to extend the franchise, making sure that the inventory in the House of Furst is put to good use.

Interestingly, the people who see the world in black and white are among the most dangerous: namely, the Communists. Furst's books make the appeal of Communism in the 1930s comprehensible: all the other major political parties and figures-- Churchill excepted, but he's only a quote in the newspaper-- are constitutionally incapable of standing up to fascism, even as they see Hitler marching through central Europe. The Communists, in contrast, are willing to take action and take losses: they know what they're up against, and don't screw around. But Furst isn't romantic about them, especially in Dark Star and Night Soldiers, the two books featuring prominent Soviet characters. The Communists aren't noble, just every bit as ruthless as Hitler and Mussolini. (Americans are almost completely absent in these books, but America comes out looking really good, given the horrors of the Axis and the cultured ambivalence of Western Europe.)

As much fun as the Paris books are, I'd love for Furst to broaden out more. Dark Voyage was off the map, and an excellent book as a result. I'd like to see him write a book set mainly in Berlin-- his style is well-suited to the menacing yet cultivated atmosphere of that city in the 1930s. Or write something set mainly in Vienna or Copenhagen or London, for that matter.

Technorati Tags: alan furst, books, foreign correspondent

It was a dark and stormy night... No, Call me Ishmael... No, In the Beginning

The Guardian reports on a, ahem, novel writing exercise:

Author turns to eBay in search for collaborators

A first-time author has bypassed the traditional route of getting an agent, and is publishing a collaborative thriller on eBay. The novel is being written one page at a time, one writer to a page. As each installment is finished, the chance to create the next is offered for auction on eBay. So far, 17 pages have been completed, with 234 to go....

Novel Twists is the brainchild of 31-year-old Phil McArthur, who got the idea while recovering from cancer. "I'd had extensive chemotherapy and I had a lot of time on my hands to recover," he says. "I found I was reading a lot more, and that inspired me to think maybe I could write something myself."

He had planned to write the book alone, but then realised there must be many more budding novelists out there. Within days of posting the first page online, he had contributors from all over the world. "The fact that it's an auction means that if people are really keen to write the next page they have a good chance of getting it," he says.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, internet

RIP Cody's Books

When I was a postdoc, I spent a fair amount of time-- and more than a responsible portion of my disposable income-- at Cody's Books, one of several great bookstores within a couple blocks of my apartment. (I spent even more at Moe's, where my father had taken me when I was a kid and he a grad student in the history department.)

Today, I happened across word that Cody's is closing.

Like Keplers, Cody's was founded in the 1950s, for decades has been a local institution (its founders helped create the Berkeley Free Clinic), and had no small global reputation: it continued carrying Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses when most bookstores pulled it. But mainly I think of it as one of the centerpieces of Berkeley public intellectual culture: I'd regularly stop there on the way home from campus and catch up on the latest history titles (Moe's is the place to go for used books); to get the Sunday Times (along with a couple croissants from their cafe); to hear a wonderful assortment of speakers; and generally to feel the pulse of literary life. Goodbye to all that.

Technorati Tags: Berkeley, books

Writing about e21

I've been working, off and on, for a couple months on an Encyclopedia of the 21st Century. The work has now reached the point where I'm devoting more than a few processor cycles to it, so naturally I've done what anyone would do at this point: started blogging about it.

Not that I don't have enough to do, but writing the history of the future was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

[To the tune of Sarah McLachlan, "Building a Mystery," from the album "Mirrorball".]

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, future

Stalked by the author!

Fifty minutes ago, I posted about having bought Adam Greenfield's new book Everyware. I just got a comment from the author.

Amazing how authors and readers are drawn together these days. I haven't seen anything like this since... Ramez Naam blogged about my review of his book, More Than Human.

Not that I'll feel any pressure to say good things about it now, or anything. Of course, Adam's probably already traced my IP address and figured out where I live....

And hey-- I mentioned buying two books in that last post! Yo Vincent Mosco! Where you at?

Technorati Tags: Everyware, reading

J. K. Rowling, futurist

The DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out last week. I haven't bought it yet-- Pride and Prejudice just arrived last week-- but it'll only be a matter of time. I've been a big fan of the series, in part because I suspect eventually some readers are going to start building things in the books.

[To the tune of Elton John, "The One (1996)," from the album "Love Songs".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, science_fiction

If I don't get one of these...

From Cool Hunting:

Thumbthing is a brilliant little invention for bibliophiles and casual readers alike. The colorful molded plastic piece fits on your thumb and holds the book open making one-handed reading much more satisfying. Available with 4 different thumb hole sizes, the Thumbthing doubles as a bookmark when not in use.

Clearly I need it.

Technorati Tags: reading

Lost in translation

Playboy in Braille? As Jacques Derrida said, every decoding is another encoding.

Technorati Tags: books, reading

I like the red cover

Gizmodo points to the Brockhaus Encyclopedia on a flash drive:

I admit, I haven’t used an encyclopedia for quite a while, but I remember those school days when I really did need it. Apart from taking up a ludicrous amount of space, they were always out of order—I was a weak kid!—and difficult to carry around. So what do the Germans do? In their fantastically, orderly way, they have assembled the entire Brockhaus Encyclopedia onto a 1GB flash drive.... And they even made it a nice mahagony-red so you’ll feel scholarly.

For the record, Encyclopaedia Britannica would easily fit on a 1 GB drive.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia

Noyce biography

I don't know how long it's been out, but I just stumbled on my review of Leslie Berlin's The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, in the November-December 2005 issue of American Scientist. Doesn't look like there's a password required to get to the piece.

For those who don't know about him, here's a brief bio:

Noyce, the son of a minister, attended Grinnell College and then got a doctorate in physics from MIT. Two years later, in 1955, he moved to California to join a company in Palo Alto that had just been started by William Shockley, one of the coinventors of the transistor. Shockley's remarkable eye for talent was exceeded only by his gift for mismanagement. Less than two years later, the men in the photograph, who had all worked for Shockley—the "Traitorous Eight," he named them—were dissatisfied enough to strike off and found their own company: Fairchild Semiconductor. There Noyce invented the integrated circuit (at about the same time that Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby also produced one). And he quickly rose to the rank of general manager. A decade later, Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild to start a second company, Intel, which became a leader in the semiconductor industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

So he's well worth a biography. And Leslie Berlin's is a good one.

[To the tune of Zero, "Little Wing," from the album "1990-05-26 - Sweetwater Saloon".]

Technorati Tags: books, Silicon Valley, STS

iTunes Visualizer, aka Toddler Mesmerizer

In What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff tells a story about Steve Jobs showing him iTunes. At one point, Jobs turned on the visualizer, and remarked wryly that "it reminds me of my youth." This then led to a long discussion about LSD and its importance to early computer hackers-- and Markoff's book.

My children have both been iTunes visualizer fans. My daughter finds it entertaining, but my son finds it downright mesmerizing. When he was a baby, and waking up at all hours of the night, the one thing that would invariably get him back to sleep was Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, and the visualizer. He'd see the patterns start in "So What," and get wide-eyed; then after a moment-- maybe once Coltrane's solo started-- he'd put his head down on my shoulder. By "Freddie Freeloader" he was transfixed, and calm; usually he was asleep before "Blue in Green." (If that didn't work, it was into the car for a drive.)

Now, when I'm putting him to bed he sometimes asks to listen to some song, "with the patterns." (He asks for it with the same cadence and tone of voice you'd use to order a mixed drink on the rocks: "I'll have a vodka tonic-- with the patterns.") Usually he falls asleep pretty quickly, the flicker of the visualizer lighting his face. He'll comment on them at first-- "That's bee-ooh-tee-full!"-- but after a couple minutes he'll just watch, then his eyes close....

Tonight he woke up around 11, and after a brief struggle over what kind of drink he could have before going back to sleep, I put him back to bed, with the promise that he could have the patterns. It took longer than usual, but it worked.

Who knows how long it'll help him fall asleep, or what the long-term consequences will be. Maybe I'm creating his generation's William Burroughs, or Paul Kahn. Or maybe when he's older, he'll just look at the visualizer and think, it reminds me of my youth, too.

[To the tune of Warner Brothers Symphony Orchestra, "What's Opera Doc?," from the album "Bugs Bunny On Broadway".]

Technorati Tags: children, visualization, What the Dormouse Said

Library Thing

An interesting concept: LibraryThing, personal online catalogs with LOC tie-in and a social softwarish aspect.

[To the tune of Sting, "The Book of My Life," from the album "Sacred Love".]

Technorati Tags: books, internet, social_software

Reading as a martial art

After taking note of Jill Davis' copy of What the Dormouse Said, I thought I should show what my copy looks like now:

My standard practice now is to attach a bunch of Post-Its of various sizes to the back cover of a book that I think I'm going to read carefully, so they'll be easy to hand. With a good book-- or one I have serious arguments with-- I'll use up with a few dozen stickies.

For purposes of comparison, here's my copy of William Mitchell's Me++: The Extended Self in the Networked City:

This is, I admit, the reading equivalent of strip-mining: it's an exercise in extracting the meaning from a book, and leaving behind an artifact that's virtually unusable for others. Yes, the words are all still there, so in one sense nothing's been "extracted;" yet it's almost always more distracting than enlightening to try to read through someone else's comments, and so in that sense heavy markup makes it harder for a new reader to (depending on your favorite flavor of literary theory) engage with the original text, or make their own sense of a book.

Though occasionally it can be an interesting experience: in the Stanford Library I once found a copy of William Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" that had been read, and annotated, by a couple generations of students, including at least one who was the grandson of one president Turner mentions.

[To the tune of Double, "U ("Astro Base" Remix)," from the album "Gee(Gts) Presents Greatest Remix".]

Technorati Tags: books, reading, What the Dormouse Said

Kepler's rally

The Palo Alto Online has an article about today's pro-Kepler's rally.

[via The litter in litterateur]

[To the tune of Steely Dan, "Green Book," from the album "Everything Must Go".]

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park, Silicon Valley

More on Kepler's

Apparently, the story isn't completely over. The mayor of Menlo Park sent out an e-mail saying that

Dave Johnson, the city’s economic manager, has been facilitating meetings between Clark Kepler and his landlord, the Tan group, for several months. These are ongoing.

Johnson is contacting national and local independent booksellers to find a replacement for Kepler’s, should attempts to restore Kepler’s fail. (It is not yet clear what actions Kepler himself has taken in this respect.)

A group of investors has formed. Further financial action will of necessity involve creditors, the terms of the Chapter 7 bankruptcy itself, and the ability to introduce cost-saving and marketing measures that allows an independent bookseller to sustain itself long-term.

The litter in litterateur has a page on Kepler's coverage.

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Terrapin Station Part 1," from the album "Terrapin Station".]

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park

History of Kepler's

Two new pieces give you some sense of just what kind of place Kepler's has in the history of Silicon Valley.

The Palo Alto Online published a long history of Kepler's that reviews its life from the 1950s.

John Markoff has an article about Kepler's in the New York Times that focuses more on its role as nexus of the counterculture and computer worlds in the 1960s-- a subject that he's uniquely qualified to discuss. I'm offended that he didn't call me for a quote, though it's not like the piece suffers:

"I was a glassy-eyed undergraduate," said Stewart Brand, who began frequenting the bookstore while studying biology at Stanford. "It was a pillar of local civilization."...

Ira Sandperl, a Ghandian scholar who would become the folk singer Joan Baez's mentor in the late 50's, was a fixture behind the cash register until he retired in 1988.... Mr. Sandperl recalled being driven to distraction by the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and his friends, who would practice the same song endlessly many nights at the bookstore. He recalled phoning Mr. Kepler to ask if he could throw them out of the store because he disliked their music so much, but he was told they were harmless.

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Friend Of The Devil," from the album "American Beauty".]

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park

Rent and Kepler's

Having spent a good part of last year helping the Institute move from its incredibly nice but expensive Sand Hill Road offices to its current incredibly nicer but less expensive University Avenue offices, I know first-hand how much difference a renegotiated lease can make to the health of a business.

When I heard about Kepler's closing, my first thought was, "I bet they signed a lease at the height of the boom." Sure enough:

'Pre-bubble' rent helped kill Kepler's

An "inordinately high 'pre-bubble' rent structure" contributed to the financial crisis that forced Kepler's Bookstore to close, David Johnson, Menlo Park's business development officer, told City Council members in a late-morning e-mail today.

He said he is starting today on an "effort to find a suitable replacement business" for the central location on El Camino Real in downtown Menlo Park.

Johnson said a notice posted this morning on Kepler's entrance "indicates that they were never able to recover from the economic downturn that began in 2001."

He said the city "worked with Clark Kepler to help him in seeking relief from an inordinately high 'pre-bubble' rent structure. No relief was granted."

A receptionist at the Tan Group, based in Palo Alto and owner of the building complex that houses Kepler's, said today there was nobody there who wanted to comment.

No kidding....

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park

How to read a book

reading now
via Flickr

I love books, but sometimes hesitate to loan out books that I've read closely. Not because I worry that I won't get them back-- I choose my friends carefully-- but because they tend to be really marked when I'm done with them. Serious reading is a martial art, and there's usually an inverse relationship between how closely I've read a book, and how readable my copy is.

Apparently I'm not the only one in the world who takes this attitude, particularly with a really good book. The notepad as bookmark seems just about right for a book like "What the Dormouse Said."

Technorati Tags: books, Silicon Valley, What the Dormouse Said

It's really true: Kepler's is closed

Not long after I heard the news, I left work and headed over to Kepler's to see for myself. There was a small crowd of people mulling around the front door; almost everyone had heard, and like me, seemed to need to come see it for themselves.

This is the sign on the door.

The notice reads:

After 50 years of bookselling in Menlo Park, Kepler's is going out of business. As much as love what we do and would like to continue another 50 years, we simply cannot. The economic downturn since 2001 has proved to be more from which we can rebound.

Kepler's has enjoyed the support of the community from our inception in the 1950s through both turbulent and joyful times. We are blessed to have served as your community bookseller for all of those years.

We want to express our heart felt gratitude appreciate to the multitude of people who have loved and supported us over the past half century.

Given that they just had their 50th anniversary, it must be doubly hard to close.

I've got a Flickr photoset of other pictures.

This is the second great, independent bookstore the town has lost this year: Wessex Books closed a couple months ago.

I can't help but wonder, what the Hell happened to make them close so suddenly? What's going to happen to the inventory? Presumably they'll have a liquidation sale, or maybe the outrage will be great enough there'll be some popular response that helps them stay open.

I've got to believe that I'm not the only one who would, in exchange for some largely theoretical fractional share of the store, would fork over a few dollars a month to keep the place open. I already buy plenty of books there, but could there be an opportunity here for some user self-organization and investment? Legally, I'm sure it could be made to work in a way that would allow users to invest without making them liable for losses, lawsuits, etc.; and while I don't want to run a bookstore, I think enough of us value the place as a place to be willing to put up to keep it open. If a thousand people were willing to put in a few dollars a month, that might make the difference.

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park, Silicon Valley

Kepler's closes?

I can't believe this:

Kepler's Bookstore goes out of business

Kepler's, a landmark bookstore and cultural icon of Menlo Park for more than a half century, abruptly closed for good this morning.

"This is it," owner Clark Kepler told about 40 employees at a 9 a.m. all-staff meeting, shedding tears. Employees were left stunned and reeling from the announcement as Kepler cited financial problems that had built since the dot-com bust of 2001. Some employees cried during Kepler's short announcement.

I've loved Keplers for years. When I was a postdoc here, I spent lots of evenings-- and a substantial portion of my insubstantial disposable income-- there. More recently I've been taking the kids there for Saturday story time.

The place has always been busy and vibrant-- just the kind of place that makes a public culture worth participating in-- and the speaker series has been outstanding and well-attended.

When a place as good as Keplers is forced to close because of high area rents, it's a sign that something is profoundly wrong. What's going to go in there? Upscale clothes? Faux Craftsman home furnishings? Another damned yoga studio?

I think I've got to go over there and see it for myself.

Technorati Tags: books, Kepler's Books, menlo park, Silicon Valley

Why couldn't...

my book have been marketed like this? If I had only written a FAQ about it.

Technorati Tags: books, humor

Reviewing

Michael Chorost notes that

The L.A. Times review has just come out. It’s a good one!

Quality work, all the time. Also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs....

Actually, this phenomenon of the review being but one element-- or token, or salvo, depending on the review's opinion of the book-- in a public conversation about a book is a very interesting thing. It can make the days surrounding the appearance of a review more active, but it doesn't yet change the reviews themselves. I don't pull any punches if I think the author will have a Web site and can respond to what I write, nor do I get more critical if they don't. (So far as I can tell, Leslie Berlin doesn't have a blog, but I didn't take that as license to trash her Noyce biography.)

On the subject of reviews, Jaron Lanier does a nice job with Markoff's What the Dormouse Said.

[To the tune of Neil Young, "Cinnamon Girl," from the album "Weld".]

Technorati Tags: books, reading, Rebuilt

It's out!

My review of Michael Chorost's Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human is on the L.A. Times Web site. I think it's also the lead review, but I haven't seen hard copy yet; I've got a couple copies reserved at my local bookstore.

Unlike my review of More Than Human : Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, I actually found this one myself.

[To the tune of Barbie, "How Can I Refuse?," from the album "Barbie Sings!: The Princess Movie Song Collection".]

Technorati Tags: books, Rebuilt

Children's books, the original new media

I was in graduate school during the French Invasion-- the period when the works of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, and other French theorists became amazingly popular (and eventually controversial) among American social science and humanities academics.

Even though I was in a department that considered itself pretty cutting-edge and out there, I read only a sliver of that literature. One of the central claims that people tended to take away from writers like Derrida was that everything was a text-- the book, the shirt, the coffee table, reality, the whole enchilada-- and thus could be understood using the tools of literary theory.

Deconstruction has been subject to plenty of critiques, but one thing always stood out for me: while literary theory made grand claims for the universality of texts, the texts upon which literary theory was built-- the ones that served as the empirical data that the theory was supposed to explain-- were pretty narrow. When people talked about "texts," they mainly had "scholarly books" in mind.

For some time, I've wondered what a literary theory built upon children's books would look like. What would your theory of the text be like if you had to account for texts that were machine-washable, designed to repel drool, had moving parts, or fur and perfume (think of Pat the Bunny)? Could one speak so confidently about the linearity of a text when it has a little bookmark with a stuffed animal on it that you Velcro to the pages? Do arguments about the passiveness of "the reader" hold up when the book is read aloud by one person to another, and that other person might try to bite the book?

I was reminded of these questions again last week when I took my children to a bookstore, and my son found this:

It's from a local publisher, Klutz Books, which does a lot of children's and activity books. It's a book-- or a collection of books-- designed to be read by children on car trips. In fact, it's designed to fit in a cup holder-- by far the healthiest use of cup holders I've seen in a while.

For anyone who can't read it, the contents are listed as "4 activity books for the road. 160 pages of puzzles, games, dot-to-dots, tricks, trivia, magic, mazes, jokes, doodles..."

Obviously, in one sense it's not a book. Yet it's sold in a bookstore, and you're supposed to do recognizably book-related things with it (for parents, the most important of those things is sit still and be quiet). It's a text. But does it have a theory that can adequately explain it?

Of course, hornbooks and chapbooks were innovative artifacts in their day-- meaning the Renaissance. Books for children have long been on the margins of publishing, but in interesting ways. Today, you've got children's books that fit in cup-holders; books that almost read themselves to you; books that you're supposed to read, but also manipulate, stretch, view through funny glasses, and the like. You have to wonder if there are some reading practices that will develop in this wonderfully heterogeneous, deeply physical form of literature, and will seriously affect the ways we read-- and the ways we think about what texts are.

Technorati Tags: books, children, media, postacademic, reading

Man Behind the Microchip

Just finished reading Leslie Berlin's new biography of Robert Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip, which I'm reviewing for American Scientist. (After this, I swear, it's no more reviews for a while: instead, I'm going to devote some quality time to a couple articles I've left languishing, and the proposal for my next book.)

My wife, meanwhile, is buried in the latest Harry Potter, which hit our doorstep (doubtless with a heavy thud) this afternoon.

Just another happening Saturday night....

Technorati Tags: books, reading

Rebuilt

Yesterday, a copy of Michael Chorost's book Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human arrived on my doorstep. Given that I'm getting increasingly plaintive, annoyed, and slightly hostile e-mails from some people who invited me to a conference in England at the end of the month, asking where in the world my paper is, I should have shoved the book into the corner of a bookcase, and kept plowing away on my conference talk.

However, you can't think about the same thing 24 hours a day, and it's hard to actually work on a talk when you're watching the kids, while reading is both easier a bit more socially acceptable. So I dipped into it... I'll have more to say about it later, but for now, suffice it to say, it's really good. The cyborg memoir has arrived.

Perhaps best of all, now that a first-hand account of becoming a cyborg has arrived, everyone can stop reading Haraway.

And guys: I'm sending the talk tomorrow. I swear. And actually, reading Rebuilt has helped me think through some stuff about the uses of science studies, so it's actually a good thing that I'm late. Okay, it's not. That's just rationalization.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "Speak To Me / Breathe," from the album "Dark Side of the Moon".]

Technorati Tags: cyborg, Rebuilt

Markoff @ PARC

John Markoff was at PARC last night, talking about his new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. Tom Foremski has a great account of the evening.

I wasn't able to go: some of my daughter's friends are starting a Brownie troop, so I stayed with the kids while my wife went to the organizing meeting. However, I also managed to finish the book and start writing the review, so it was time well spent.

[To the tune of Blood, Sweat & Tears, "And When I Die," from the album "Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: books, Silicon_Valley, What the Dormouse Said

Not now, Daddy's reading

From Daniel Pink's blog:

Bob Woodward's front page story about how he came to befriend Mark "Deep Throat" Felt is a great read -- not to mention, the stuff of legend. At the Pink House this morning, the story had one riveted (but unnamed) parent batting away children and saying, "Get your own breakfast."

Ha!

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "Touch Of Grey," from the album "1995-07-09 - Soldier Field".]

Technorati Tags: books, reading

Darknet

A copy of J. D. Lasica's latest book, Darknet : Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation, landed on my desk at the Institute today. Actually, I don't have a desk; I just perch in various places, depending on what work I'm doing.

Anyway, it found me.

I haven't got time to dive into it yet, tempting though it is-- I've got to finish the Markoff book and review for L. A. Times, then it's on to the new Noyce biography for American Scientist-- but you have to admire a book that has an inside flap quote that reads:

"That was a very nice presentation," a Hollywood studio chief said to a delegation from TiVo after seeing the device in action. "Now go set yourselves on fire."

[To the tune of Firefall, "Clouds Across the Sun," from the album "Clouds Across the Sun".]

Technorati Tags: books, digital culture

Computers and Peninsula

When I was a junior, I took a course on the history of modern architecture. Taught by David Brownlee, who at the time was a young, rising star in the Penn art history department (and has since gone on to be one of those professors who define an institution-- a few years ago he drove the creation of Penn's college house system), it was one of those classes that changes the way you see the world. Right after the midterm I went to New York City, and was amazed at how many of the buildings I either recognized by name (hey, that's the Lever House! there's Saarinen's CBS building! that's a Paul Rudolph!) or by style (New Brutalism, yuck).

One fun thing about reading John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said is that, if you live in the right place, the book provides a similar experience. It just happens that I live in the neighborhood where most of the book's action takes place-- in other words, where the concept of personal computing was invented. Stanford, where a lot of the key work on AI and timesharing took place, is a couple miles away. SRI, where Doug Engelbart and his group did their pioneering work, is even closer. I take my kids to Keplers Bookstore, which was a magnet for the early 1960s counterculture, for story time every Saturday morning. The offices of the Whole Earth Catalog are across the street from the cafe where we go every Saturday after gymnastics.

So the book provides some historical depth to places that I see almost every day. And while it doesn't talk explicitly about it, the book also reveals as aspect of the history of my kids' school that I hadn't appreciated before.

There are hardly any computers at Peninsula School; flag-making and face-painting are about as high-tech as you get. The school itself is a little low-tech, even anti-tech, and has always been so. Yet most of the kids are from families that are in high tech in one way or another, and if you asked them, the parents would say that they consider computer literacy to be an essential element of modern education. It's always seemed a little odd to me, but Peninsula is fundamentally a happy place with many small eccentricities.

Yet the connections between Peninsula World and the computer world turn out to go a lot deeper than I realized. In What the Dormouse Said, I keep running across names that I know from the school: people who had kids at the school, who taught there, who wrote about progressive education, or who still live just around the corner from the campus. Computers may not be in the classrooms, but since the early 1960s they've been talked about in the parking lot, in parents' get-togethers, or sneaking in at night. I once read that some of the earliest meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club were at Peninsula. Suddenly it makes perfect sense: lots of Homebrew people were connected to the school, or just one step removed from it.

It confirms something I realized a while ago: you could write an interesting history of Silicon Valley through the prism of its progressive and private schools. The most impressive power scenes in the Valley aren't board meetings, or dinners at Il Fornaio; they're at swim meets and graduations, and the lines of cars waiting to pick up kids after school.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Follow You, Follow Me," from the album "And Then There Were Three...".]

Technorati Tags: history, Peninsula School, Silicon_Valley, What the Dormouse Said

Computing and the counterculture

Markoff is hardly the only person to write on the relationship between the counterculture and personal computing (or the Internet more generally): Stewart Brand and Theodore Roszak both wrote first-hand accounts of the intersection of the two, and Fred Turner is doing some really outstanding work on Brand, the WELL, and Bay Area computer culture.

[To the tune of Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up In Blue," from the album "Biograph (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: books, Silicon_Valley, What

Bad Books

Human Events, "the national conservative weekly," has a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Interestingly, the Kinsey report and John Dewey's Democracy and Education were rated more dangerous than Das Kapital. And Comte's work on positivism ranks much higher than Origin of Species.

I also like the little, Wikipedia-like summaries:

Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

That's the problem with the administration-- they've been reading too much Keynes!

But my favorite detail is that the piece links to copies of the books on Amazon, with Human Events' Amazon Associates number. So if you click through to Beyond Good and Evil (#9) or The Feminine Mystique (#7), at least you'll be doing a little good in the world.

[via Wonkette]

[To the tune of Dr. Dre, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'," from the album "Death Row Greatest Hits".]

Technorati Tags: books

What the Dormouse Said

I'm reading John Markoff's latest book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. Markoff covers Silicon Valley, and the computer industry more broadly, for the New York Times; he's also a Palo Alto native, and his book reflects both his professional interests and (much more indirectly) his own history. It has a slightly elusive personal quality to it: there's nothing autobiographical about it-- Markoff himself isn't a player in the story, and was in middle school and high school through most of the book-- but nonetheless you sense his presence in a way you don't with more conventional histories.

So far, two things stand out in the book.

First, Markoff writes at length about a circle of scientists and engineers who were experimenting with LSD (and to some degree other hallucinogens) in the early and mid-1960s: there was a circle at Ampex, and another centered around Jim Fadiman (a psychologist, author, and nephew of literary lion Clifton Fadiman). But these weren't fuzzy consciousness-raising experiments: many users tried LSD because they thought it could make them more creative. It was all very nerdy yet cutting-edge, in an identifiably Valley way: less "let's become one with the Universe" than "let's figure out how to reconcile quantum physics and relativity." Doping was what you did with semiconductors; dropping acid was something more akin to visiting a really supercharged, life-changing Starbucks-- a quest for something that would help you be smarter, in some really radical way.

Second, the book isn't about the counterculture in the Bay Area; it's very specifically about the Palo Alto-Menlo Park area. Markoff never comes out and says it, but I get the feeling that one of the book's aims is to establish that this area is every bit as important in the history of the Sixties as Berkeley and San Francisco, and maybe even more important. Sure, Berkeley and San Francisco got 99% of the press, and loom larger in the collective memory, but while everyone's attention was focused on Berkeley, the real world-changing stuff was happening down here in supposedly-sleepy Palo Alto.

Update: My review of the book.

[To the tune of David Bowie & Pat Metheny Group, "This Is Not America," from the album "Best of Bowie".]

Technorati Tags: history, Silicon_Valley, What the Dormouse Said