Who are the people of the Tea Party movement? Today I happened to be in Washington, D.C., at the same time as Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally on the National Mall. My brother and I went out to see what it was all about. Here are some photos of the crowd.
(Updated 8:19 p.m. ET) A producer from the BBC interviewed me Friday for a segment on the Islamic Center near Ground Zero. You can watch the video above or see it on the BBC News web site.
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I’m not about to dis Cleveland. It’s the city where my dad was born and several of my relatives still live. That said, I’m not weeping over LeBron James’s choice to abandon his hometown for a bigger market and more money. King James is exactly right to go to Miami.
In America, we are all free agents. We can move from city to city, and if one city offers more appeal than another, we should go there. It’s how many of my friends and I ended up in New York. It’s good economics; theoretically a mobile workforce should mean higher employment and better pay for workers, since people are empowered to seek out jobs anywhere.
But what about the small city that gets abandoned by its best people, who are lured away like moths to bright lights? How is that fair? Doesn’t a hero owe his hometown some loyalty?
“The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry.” — E.B. White, “Here is New York.”
“If we want to have a future, we need to have more immigrants here.”—Mayor Michael Bloomberg, April 2010
I live a couple of blocks from Prospect Park, one of the best-utilized urban green spaces in the world. Constructed in the 1860s, it was designed by landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux as their encore to Central Park. To call it a success is a gross understatement. On any nice day, it’s packed with people enjoying the rolling, tree-studded lawns and ballfields, cookout areas, concert spaces and other free, public facilities.
The park is made truly rich by the Brooklyn neighborhoods that surround it. To stroll around the park is to stroll around the world. Everyone can dress how they feel most comfortable, speak their own language, and enjoy the games, foods and music from their culture. Nobody ever gets called out for looking different.
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I kind of love it when the Post and the Daily News run the same headline. Somehow it makes it seem like the world is unfolding according to plan. But “27th HEAVEN”? Is that really the best they could do?
Also, go Yankees!!
“Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago.” — The Wall Street Journal, June 20
That was a front-page scoop on Saturday. The story communicated one fact in the first sentence with no attribution, and the rest of the article was mostly background. It’s a weird way to structure a story. It tells us the reporters knew one thing with absolute certainty, but didn’t now anything else.
I enjoy trying to guess who the anonymous sources are in stories. (Quite often it’s somebody quoted on-the-record elsewhere in the story.) So who was the Journal‘s source? It’s curious that rather than attributing it to a “knowledgeable source” or “someone close to Jobs” or “an Apple source,” the Journal writers left it totally unspecific. That alone is an important clue. It means the writers are so sure their information is accurate that they’re willing to write from assertion (sometimes called the “Voice of God”). They must have proof the story is true. Yet they also have a good reason to cite no source. Based on those clues, here are my top five suspects, in descending order of likelihood. (more…)
Of interest if you’re paying attention to the Iran protest coverage: I just posted some ramblings on why the Neda video represents a new kind of reporting on my work blog, PDNPulse.
J.J. Abrams’ awesome remake of Star Trek was branded as a reboot. I suspect it’s the first time that word has been used to market a movie, but we all instantly knew what it meant. I’ve also heard the same word — reboot — used to describe the government’s attempts to fix the economy. Let’s take as a given: People are using the word reboot a lot these days.
It’s an elegant word that comes from computers. (Merriam-Webster: boot: “to start or ready for use especially by booting a program <boot a computer> often used with up.”) Practically everybody knows how to fix a computer bug by hitting a restart button. The computer clears its memory, runs its start-up routines, and after several minutes, presto!, everything is new again. It’s like un-popping your ears or cleaning your glasses.
These days, many of our economic systems could use rebooting. Think about where you work. Imagine if you could shut the place down for a period of time, rethink everything you do, and then restart with all the current problems solved, inefficiencies purged, bugs fixed. Imagine if a company undertook a careful study of itself, figured out what it did best, trained and redeployed its people to solve its hardest problems, and came roaring back to life. It’s appealing, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, nothing works that way. Outside of the world of computers, few problems can be solved by taking something apart and fitting all the same pieces back together again. Heck, even modern computers are designed to be stable enough that you shouldn’t have to reboot them. (If Vista gives you guff, rebooting doesn’t help much.)
If you wanted to reboot General Motors, you couldn’t just shut it down, wait, and then try again. You’d have to spend a lot of money and human energy correcting a system gone wrong. You’d have to invent new things. Creation is hard, and language needs to reflect that. The makers of the new Star Trek film didn’t just re-shoot an old sci-fi flick with better special effects. They respected an existing template, but used it to say something new. It was hard, it was expensive, it paid off.
Reboot just sounds lazy. I submit a better word: reinvention.
“You have zero privacy… Get over it.” — Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems CEO, 1999
Take a minute and think about all the electronic data that exists about you.
The credit card company knows where I shop, and how often. The stores know which products I buy. The phone company has a record of all my travels—they know which celluar towers my phone is near, and I seldom go anywhere without my phone. The bank knows how often I get cash, how often I check my balance online, and at what times of day. Google knows which blogs I read and what I search for. My Internet provider and my employer, theoretically, can read every e-mail I write. Experian knows every addresses I’ve lived at since I was a kid. TransUnion knows where I’ve worked. Google Maps has a photo of my apartment on file for all to see. I still have copies of my academic records on my computer, and I bet my university has them backed up somewhere.
We haven’t even gotten to the stuff I voluntarily make public—my Twitter posts, my FaceBook profile, this blog, the stories I publish and the presentations I give as a journalist.
The New York Times Magazine has a story this week about what credit card mathematicians know about customers. Most companies are conservative about taking action based on what they know, but oh the things they know! Example: People who buy wild bird seed are likely to make their credit card payments on time.
Where does this lead? Under one scenario, companies or the government will gather as much information as they can and run it through complex algorithms to evaluate everyone. With every choice we make, we’ll have to think about how it would appear if examined by an outsider. Will buying a beer hurt my credit score? Life will be about cheezy, tedious, pointless rules: SAT prep or search engine optimization, but for real life. We’ll lose our freedom to be original.
But then there’s a second scenario, one that I think is more likely. For decades, banks and mortgage lenders have had access to credit scores and other predictive data about how people will spend money, and they still blew it. Hence the credit crisis. Company forecasts for 2009 have been wrong everywhere. Stock brokers, who trade in math and numbers, have lost heaps of money. The temptation to doubt statistics—and the fact that statistics can be manipulated and sometimes contradict each other—is too powerful.
Human nature means most of the data we collect is useless field of noise. Are we really to believe that we can process massive amounts of data and use it to predict human behavoir? Our digital record says a lot about us, but it still can’t predict what we’ll do next. We’re kind of random like that.
I was reading The Daily News online this morning and saw this advertisement:
Let’s break down this ad pitch: “Have you self-diagonsed yourself or your kids with a rare but scary disease? We can help get you cheap drugs from another country.”
I wonder what gets more clicks, this or Canadian Viagra?