Here I go

This has run its course.


Let me introduce, however, to my favorite blog, called Unbiased Eye. Check it out.

Judgment Day Is Upon Us

The paywall approaches. Slowly, the New York Times has been changing the links on the website. It's just a naming convention that reflects the way the Times servers find the files that are displayed on your browser.

Web sites do this from time to time for various reasons, but you wouldn't be doing it when you're about to do another big change to the web site. They're doing it slowly, timidly lest something break. And there was the first vague target of after New Year's, which was moved to the end of the quarter -- just two or three weeks away.

I understand their desire to be cautious. Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation looked like bunglers when when their new online paper, the Daily, was delayed a few weeks. Consequently, it's reasonable that the paper is tight-lipped about the date, and about the terms. It was amusing to read the Times's public editor complain about the lack of news in his column a few days ago called "The News You Didn't Read Here".

Surprise! The Times is a for-profit corporation that doesn't want to screw this up. I also imagine it wants to make the most out of readers' habits. News reading, I'm afraid, is a habit for many. I don't know if user surveys and focus groups even ask if people read the paper because they always used to read it. If I were the Times, I wouldn't want people to think about it too much. They are going to allow casual readers see a few stories every day. They've got numbers to pore over, but I don't know if the numbers will tell them what passes through peoples' minds when they idly click on something. A click doesn't mean that the clicker is thinking, Sure, I'd pay 50 cents to read this (or whatever the cost would be).

What is surprising is that the Times's competitors don't say anything. This is a pretty good story, but no one is able to dig anything up. There's really not much to be done if the principals have no motive to say anything.

The outcome will be interesting. I think the decision is likely to bite the Times, but at the same time show how valuable the news is. That may sound paradoxical, but if the Times can't make this work, they will have to pull back, and then we'll all lose something, and we won't like it -- at least I won't like it -- but I can't afford to shell out $20 and $30 each month for all these businesses with their hands out. Of course, if they succeed, they'll be heroes to every publisher in the Western world.

Wall Street doesn't seem enthusiastic about this, either. After a spike in the stock price when the Times announced its quarterly results, the share prices has been sagging. To me, advertisers don't seem too impressed either. Some days there's a fair amount; other days it's almost all house ads.

It's been a long wait. Publishers have been considering this move for a very long time. In 1996, the Times ran a news story that said, "Recently, publishers including Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal, a unit of Dow Jones & Company and The New York Times Company have all said they would soon begin charging for some of their Web site information." Read it. What allowed the Journal to charge, and what stopped the rest of them?

I understand that no one can afford to keep a slew of people scattered around the world to report on civil war in Libya and the tsunami in Japan out of the goodness of their hearts. But no one is going to guarantee publishers a big profit just because they're publishers and once printed newspapers.

My hunch has always been that the news has tremendous value to many people, but that the newspaper is archaic. In almost 20 years, the publishers have been fooling around with putting a representation of the paper edition on the web, grudgingly accepting some Internet conventions. They're doing an OK job with the 24-hour idea, which of course the wires, radio and television have done for decades. But no newspaper has quite become an Internet operation.

In the past two months, I've read the paper closely, and I see that it's still much the same collection of news and features that cost 50 cents back then. I threw most of the pages out then unread, and it hasn't changed. Back then we didn't have a choice. It was all or nothing. The situation is much different today.

The most interesting thing about my experiment is how much I liked doing it. The focus on the one newspaper started to feel stale. My interest in what's happening in the world soared. I like writing these pieces, and I like researching them. I've decided to regroup and start a blog that's not constrained by one narrow question. My last piece, on Tuesday, had nothing to do with the Times, but a lot about the news. I'm preparing a couple of new pieces, and I'm setting up a new venue. I'll post a note here when the new site is ready, this weekend.

Oh, will I buy a Times's subscription? It depends. Does the Times have so much that is unique and important that I will need to read it in order to make sense out of events? What do you think?

On Selling One's Body

Something happens to a person when he or she has to sell himself in order to survive. They lose their dignity; they look wormy and ugly. They lose their moral compass. Even when it's all talk.

Today, I had the dubious pleasure of watching two videos showing middle-aged white men in suits panting at people with money, acting their seductive best. We saw it only last week in the famous Scott Walker telephone call.

The more recent video showed an NPR fund-raiser hustling a couple of fake Muslims from conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe's stable of actors in an expensive Washington restaurant. This one was all over the place by mid-day Tuesday.

The earlier one was a very short, surreptitious recording of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown hustling David Koch for campaign contributions at the dedication of Koch's new cancer research center at M.I.T. This one had to be searched out from left-leaning sites and television shows.

In the edited down version of the video linked above, the NPR fund-raiser, Ronald Schiller, says a bunch of things that are basically true, though a bit startling. He says them in a way that would be palatable to people he thinks are a couple of wealthy Muslims. He's trying to sell them on NPR because they had dangled a $5 million contribution to NPR. (As a sidelight, it's weird why he doesn't ask why a rich Nigerian is tied up with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.)

This sort of thing is what happens when public organizations have to hustle for foundation contributions to stay alive. Not just NPR, but every research lab, every college and university, every arts organization, all of them and more. (If you're not familiar with business lunches, take a look at the two-hour version of the video. They're dreadful.)

It's really no different than what you see in the few seconds of the other video -- on Scott Brown begging Koch for money for 2012. Unless a person has Bloomberg-scale millions of his own money, this is what he has do most of the time to keep his job.

The real moral of these two videos is that money talks.

I know that the debate is raging over the attack journalism tactics. Maybe they're not dignified but they're telling us something important.

I also know that more debate is raging over Schiller's words, especially what he said about racism on the right. That's another story, and I believe it is an example of what Eric Holder, the attorney general, meant when he said we don't really talk about race. People can behave racist, but no one speaks the word -- that's forbidden.

What's to be done?

I have two suggestions:

1. If you listen to public radio, or watch public television, send them a check. It's your station if you want it.
2. If you vote, avoid the guy who raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a lousy senate seat. It's your country if you want it.

Left Brain, Right Brain

The hoary distinction between the analytical and artist halves of our brain is having a field day.

Superfast computers seem to be challenging the very essence of humanity, brushing aside the classic debate about personalities and which kind you might be. The question has morphed into can a machine think? Does it have art?

The recent debut of Watson, IBM's game-show machine, has aroused a flurry of attention. Reading the Times closely, as I have been since January, gives us a stand-in for the larger debate out there.

On the one side, you have a cheerleading reporter like John Markoff, reveling in the triumph of Watson over a couple of human Jeopardy champions. Note that Watson doesn't play any television game show, but only Jeopardy. That's an important point. Markoff had another piece a few days ago in an intermittent series called Smarter Than You Think, this one about software that searches law cases, and therefore eliminates billable hours by law firms (sounds implausible, eh?). In both cases, he claims that the machine's accomplishment has something to do with human language understanding -- as in the movies, from HAL on through to the malevolent Skynet in the Terminator movies.

On the other side, you have philosophical objections like those from Stanley Fish, in the Opinionator, and his reinforcements, Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus wrote a famous critique of artificial intelligence 40 years ago, in which he argued that machines executing programs don't do what people do. These two supply some critical insights into artificial intelligence when they allude to the facts that machines do not have motivations, and that machines don't joke. Read Watson Still Can't Think to see how they put it.

The Times editors betray something of a bias here. While Watson's victories occasioned big coverage, there's no hint on the front of the digital Times of the existence of a short item in the Bits Column that a human has beaten Watson at Jeopardy. It was even a politician who did the trick, and a Democrat at that, Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey. Of course, in former lives, Holt was also a physicist at Princeton, but really more to the point, he was an actual Jeopardy winner -- five times in the 70s.

I say good for Holt, but he's a special case. My favorite Jeopardy player is the character played by Rosie Perez in the movie White Men Can't Jump. She plays the vodka swilling girlfriend of a two-bit basketball hustler, who spends her days memorizing the Almanac because Jeopardy is her "destiny."

Imagine your conversation with her, and then try to imagine a conversation with Watson. Play by Watson's rules: you always go first, and give the machine turned around Q&A's. Think Watson will figure out what's on your mind?

The Sixth Deadly Sin

If the New York Times is going to take Charlie Sheen at all, it is going to take him seriously.

The paper was not satisfied with the attitude toward Sheen, unlike its earlier coverage and unlike the rest of us. The only way to explain the near universal fascination with such a privileged and stubborn fuck-up like Sheen is the old sin number six, envy, which Dante called one of the forms of perverted love. And lest our efforts here be considered frivolous, we can remember that Dante was not talking about theology, but about his fellow man, real people, contemporaries, his enemies in Medieval Italy. I suppose we could find a scholar of Italian literature to explain the back-story to the cantos that touch on envy, but we'll be satisfied with just knowing that The Divine Comedy was catty.

The story with the headline of "Sheen Is Surrounded by a Coterie of Enablers" takes the high road of self-help. It discovers that a rich, handsome celebrity is surrounded by a group of money-grubbing hangers-on, or enablers in the parlance of self-help.

I think it's an underrated problem that big shots are almost always surrounded by yes men, and if the big man stays drunk, does drugs constantly and loves whores, they are the last people on earth to be appalled. I've seen this dynamic in every office I've ever worked in, every classroom I've ever suffered through, every party I've ever gone to. Yes, people suck up.

If you ever need a boost, go to a clothing store that has salesmen and try on a few things. All men customers are suddenly handsome and women beautiful.

But we need significance, as usual. So the story explains, "While bad behavior by star performers is tolerated in a number of industries -- sports and high fashion, for example -- Hollywood has a longer public history of aiding and abetting addicts."

Indeed. A drunk can run a studio into the ground, but if he's an executive who makes decisions. No one calls upon actors for decisions (unless they're voters). They are symbols. They're not supposed to do anything but pose and make the rest of us envious. No one should have to explain why such employment can make a person self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Unless they're consumed by the seventh deadly sin -- pride -- and tend to put on airs and pretend to be above it all.

Sunday Under the New York Times

I tried several times to read the Times on the web, and I can't.

Was it Frank Rich's absence? He was supposed to be there this week and next before he jumps ship to New York, but there's a terse note that says he's taken the week off. Maybe I should, too.

First off, the news is too depressing. Strictly speaking this isn't the Times's fault. I'm overwhelmed by the fighting in the Mideast. To me, that part of the newspaper is the best. These are current reports of what might (but might not) be a monumental turn in history. Sure, I'm annoyed by some excesses, but over all, the effort is awesome. The only trouble is that the wires are doing similar things. It's difficult to rate the offerings against each other.

After the Mideast, the stories go downhill fast. It's disconcerting to read the Times on the web because all the lightweight features keep moving around the front page. It's now you see it, now you don't. The stories remain on the websites, but they are hard to find unless you've saved the URL.

I read about Mitt Romney early, and wrote about it. I don't want to read about a campaign so far in the future, and I especially don't want to read a stenographic account of a candidate's speeches to prospective donors.

Here are some of my rejects:

• Maybe Woody Allen needs to hear that psychiatrists have turned away from Freudian therapy and the talking cure, but I've known that for years. I also know that shrinks long ago turned to drugs, heavy-duty anti-psychotics and mild, soothing tranquilizers. I could look up in two minutes how many billions of these drugs the big drug makers have sold. The Times Story
• Ten percent of the people are left handed. Not much is known about this asymmetry. It's a good thing medical science is pursuing this because you never know where curiosity will lead. But I don't really want to read an update that quotes a 2007 study that says, "This is really still mysterious." The Times Story
• I caught a glimpse of a sports story about weighing high school freshmen for their professional sports potential. I'm not a sports fan, and I couldn't get a fix on the story's point of view, other than the suggestion that something's rotten here. Though I saw a line that Yahoo reported this first, and so I guess this is old news. The Times Story
• How about what Al Sharpton eats for breakfast? Need I say more? The Times Is On It
• One of the most amusing stories was about shark fin soup. The Chinese like the soup, but the sharks are suffering in a big way, and California state laws may be passed to save them. The Times likes these culture clash stories, and so do I, but they have to be exotic. The only trouble with this is that it's a month late. By waiting for the Times to deliver this tidbit, we on the East Coast are missing the beauty of the web to deliver the news from anywhere, in particular the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times Story

You can see how quickly a read can be worn down, but it's Sunday. We have the prime columns.

Maureen Dowd is there, dishing on "tiger blood and Adonis DNA" though she denies it, in a profile contrasting the old Jerry Brown with the new, as governor of California. Both Tom Friedman and Nick Kristof drop in with tortured discussions of what may or may not be wrong with Arab culture. They are more polite and more reasonable than the right-wingers, but even their instant expertise isn't really more helpful.

Long ago, when I bought the Times on paper every Sunday as if it were a religious observance, the Magazine was the prize when we separated the paper into piles of what would be read and what could be thrown out immediately.

The Magazine is under new management, but it sure looked the same as it did during last two new managements. There are a mess of short, chatty features, just like the ones they replaced. There were two long stories. I started the one about Lori Berenson, who was caught up in the troubles in Peru during the days of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru movements.

Those groups fought a murderous ideological war against Peruvian society, and Berenson was arrested and jailed for 15 years as a colloborator of the latter. She is cast as a gentle soul, a vegetarian since the age of 8. I don't know if an injustice was done to her, and to what extent she helped friends in the Túpac Amaru, but if the story of one middle-class American woman is worth this 10-page article, what should be written for the 70,000 Peruvians killed during years of violence?

My Secret Plan to Quiet Mitt Romney

I wonder if many of you remember Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.

Tricky Dick was going for his second term and campaigned hard on this secret strategy to bring the boys home from the jungle death trap. He couldn't say what it was because, obviously, it was secret and had to be kept from our enemies.

The silent majority must have felt sorry for Nixon because they gave him the benefit of the doubt and voted him back in over McGovern. Nixon, after all, had inherited the war from Johnson, who, by the way, was the peace candidate in 1964. It's confusing since everyone is for peace, just as everyone is for democracy, and just as everyone is for jobs.

What's all this got to do with today's headlines and the New York Times?

The Times is running its second, unless I've missed one, big feature on the candidates for 2012, those sad yet hopeful characters who will spend the next two years trying to figure out what we want. This one is on Mitt Romney, who the story says, is going to bet on jobs. He says he knows how to create jobs because he is a businessman.

The writer waves away last week's real jobs report, which shows solid growth, and quotes Romney saying, "I like President Obama but he doesn't have a clue how jobs are created." No one asks Romney how he explains this job growth.

I agree with him. I like Obama. And I don't believe Obama knows how to create jobs. But that's not where it ends. I don't believe anyone knows how to create jobs, and I don't think it's possible for a human being in the White House to decree an economic recovery and have one materialize. Economics give us a puzzle that remains out of reach for the human mind.

But Romney's logic is ridiculous. A businessman is someone who knows how to sell something and make a profit. He has to decide what to sell, figure out how to get it made and advertise it so that you and I will shell out real money to buy it. A businessman who tells you he is in it to give you a job is a liar.

In general the Republican argument for almost everything is ridiculous. The answer to every problem is always the same: cut taxes, and do some other stuff to repair the allegedly damaged moral fiber of the country.

The real problem is the media's refusal to do their jobs. Like most political reporting, there are a lot of words in a steady stream of sound bites but no attempt to make candidates say exactly what they mean.

You read halfway down the story and see that "so far Mr. Romney has offered few specific details beyond general Republican philosophies, saying only that the country needs 'to believe in free enterprise, capitalism, limited government, federalism.'" I decode statements like that into this: Read no further.

So here we are, almost two years away from Election Day, describing in great detail what Mitt Romney sounds like. At least I haven't read in the Times a lot of complaining about the early start to presidential campaigns.

To Quiet Critics, Romney Puts 2012 Focus on Jobs