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?

Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called the local-boy-makes-good narrative. It’s one of the all-time classic stories. Nobody has done a better job of exploiting that narrative in recent years than “American Idol,” the most successful TV show of the decade. Your shining star grows up and leaves town, and the whole town follows her career’s every move.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert doesn’t see it that way. In a bizarre and bitter open letter posted last night (and set in Comic Sans on NBA.com!), Gilbert slams the player who helped make him rich.

You can tell the letter’s going to be a strange one simply by its salutation, complete with semicolon: “Dear Cleveland, All Of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Supporters Wherever You May Be Tonight;”

Gilbert gets an A+ for showmanship and boosterism, but I think he falls down with a couple of paragraphs attacking LeBron:

“If you thought we were motivated before tonight to bring the hardware to Cleveland, I can tell you that this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our ‘motivation’ to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.
…
“This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown ‘chosen one’ sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And ‘who’ we would want them to grow-up to become.”

No. Actually, LeBron sends a good message to children: Train hard. Be good. Make yourself wanted. And then call your own shots.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“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.

This is not to say people walk over and hug strangers. In New York City, people keep up defenses against unfamiliar, over-friendly people, some of whom are genuinely dangerous. Many communities prefer to keep to themselves. Prospect Park has crime, and this isn’t Utopia.

But the park is the one place where Brookyln’s many neighbor-strangers get to see each other. And it’s hard to feel distrustful or hateful about a particular group when you’ve seen them at ease, surrounded by family, enjoying a nice day in the park just like you. It works even if you never talk to them.

Sadly, over the last 50 years, America has let our community spaces disappear into low-density suburban sprawl, which isolates people in many ways.

In Arizona, there aren’t many parks like Prospect Park.

Listen to people on TV (like the clip from Fox & Friends yesterday above) and you hear a loud, organized, well-funded movement to turn neighbors against one another. It’s reinforced both by business interests and plain old racism.

The beautiful thing about America is our ability, repeated over hundreds of years of history, to overcome the people who try to divide us. Part of the reason we can do this is places like Brooklyn and Prospect Park. It’s a park of immigrants in a city of immigrants in a country of immigrants.

As a white guy from the suburbs whose family has been in America so long I’m not totally sure which countries we came from, living in Brooklyn has changed me. I’ve felt myself grow not only more tolerant of my immigrant neighbors (few of whom I actually speak to), but willing to defend them if necessary. They’re my neighbors. That’s what neighbors do. Living in Brooklyn isn’t right for everybody, but there’s something to this. I sound like an idealist, but I actually think many of the problems that plague our country’s discourse could be solved if every American spent a sunny afternoon in Prospect Park.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Also, go Yankees!!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“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.

1. Family friend: Someone at Dow Jones, perhaps an editor, is a personal friend of Jobs or someone in Jobs’ family. Faced with information this significant, and feeling pride for the newspaper where they work, this person let the reporters in on the secret.
   
2. Eavesdropping: The reporters learned it through irregular means. They overheard a conversation, or opened a piece of mis-delivered mail, or learned about it from a private Internet message board they’re not supposed to be on.
3. Unsanctioned company leak: The reporters learned it from a document leaked to them by a friend in the company. The document could have been a report to the board, an e-mail from Jobs, or even an internal voice mail. But specifying what it was could expose the person who leaked it (and who evidently likes to trade favors with journalists, or just likes to make trouble).
   
4. Steve Jobs: It’s possible Jobs passed the information along to the reporters himself, perhaps through an intermediary (see suspect #1), to cool down a rumor that was heating up. However, I don’t think the reporters themselves spoke to Jobs, since they went to the trouble of writing, “Mr. Jobs didn’t respond to an email requesting comment.” That would be a dishonest thing to put in a story if you had any communication with the subject, even if the statement were technically true.
5. Sanctioned company leak: A PR person or board member told a reporters the news on the condition of no attribution. It might be to Apple’s benefit for a story like this to appear in a single, friendly venue on a Saturday, a few weeks before Jobs’s return. It might even be a way to prepare the market for more a grave announcement about Jobs’s health. However, this isn’t Apple’s style, and the weird language of the story suggest to me that something that ordinary didn’t actually go down.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

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?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

In some ways, the URGENT craze can be traced to cable news stations. A few years ago, CNN discovered the marketing power of the phrase BREAKING NEWS, and began applying it to every story, even ones that aren’t especially important. Digging deeper into mass communications history, Twitter honors the writing format pioneered by the Associated Press for the telegraph. Correspondents were trained send the most important stuff first, as concisely as possible, and to fill in detail later.

In the last few days, we’ve seen Twitter take this to a whole other level. The culprit: Swine flu. Every middling swine flu update rises to the level of URGENT. If this continues, people will become stressed by a constant stream of noise that sounds like bad news (think post-9/11). Either that or the word “URGENT” will lose its power.

There’s the risk that an URGENT story that’s totally false could gain a lot of traction very quickly on Twitter and cause a panic. So far this hasn’t happened in a bad way, but I see it happening on a small level with business gossip.

The worst offender is the Twitter service Breaking News Online. @BreakingNews has a small staff that monitors the newswires and sends out a Tweet every time something is happening. As of this morning, 290,253 people on Twitter are following the account. They have more subscribers than The Baltimore Sun. I follow it so I don’t miss something everybody else knows.

The problem with @BreakingNews is that it breaks news that’s not news—such as earthquakes that cause no damage. It labels almost everything “URGENT” or “BULLETIN” as soon as it happens. If the news item turns out not to be URGENT, the service rows it back a few minutes later with another Tweet. I think the people writing @BreakingNews have little or no experience at an actual wire desk, since they treat every routine story as novel. @BreakingNews often gets the news wrong, sometimes because their news sources get it wrong, sometimes because the work is too hasty. Perhaps their news judgment will improve after a few months of learning the nuances of international coverage.

Of course, even a great journalist can’t publish a serious swine flu story on Twitter. Twitter is for publishing tiny micro-stories that pop like a firecracker than disappear. Nobody is going there for detail, context or archival material. Yet readers need detail and context to understand a medical story.

This is interesting. One of the foundations of blogging and traditional news Web sites was that you could host your whole archive online and people would find this useful for context. In reality, most online news archives go unread and unused. People have short attention spands and are only interested in new content. Archival content is occasionally useful to a journalist or researcher, but it’s never become that “long tail” application it might have been. (This is why I’ve argued that news sites have their free content models backwards—if you’re going to charge people to read stories, charge for the newest ones and give away your archive as a free sample.)

Watch this space. Twitter is moving fast and spreading virally. Just like swine flu.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Infrastructure repair is a classic example of something important but not interesting.

You’ve heard politicians talk about it and you’ve read news stories about it. But are you really excited about infrastructure? Repairs are slow, expensive and often invisible. A project like the Hoover Dam and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge only comes along once in a while. Most such work is more like Water Tunnel 3—a $6 billion project you’ll never even notice. Yet the way we live demands electricity, running water, roads, data cables, and so on. These aren’t systems you can build once and let ride. You have to keep paying for them.

And if you don’t pay? Single failures can have an impact way out of proportion to the initial problem (like the 2003 blackout) or kill people (the 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis). If you’ve ever traveled in a developing country, you know what a difference it makes when things don’t work. Here in the U.S., we’ve had it good for a long time. But too many of the systems on which we depend are old, stressed, patchwork, unfinished, or in need of repair. We have to spend the money.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.