Gil Scott-Heron ( April 1, 1949 -- May 27, 2011)

by Alec Wilkinson

Gil Scott-Heron is frequently called the “godfather of rap,” which is an epithet he doesn’t really care for. In 1968, when he was nineteen, he wrote a satirical spoken-word piece called “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” It was released on a very small label in 1970 and was probably heard of more than heard, but it had a following. It is the species of classic that sounds as subversive and intelligent now as it did when it was new, even though some of the references—Spiro Agnew, Natalie Wood, Roy Wilkins, Hooterville—have become dated. By the time Scott-Heron was twenty-three, he had published two novels and a book of poems and recorded three albums, each of which prospered modestly, but “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” made him famous.

Scott-Heron calls himself a bluesologist. He is sixty-one, tall and scrawny, and he lives in Harlem, in a ground-floor apartment that he doesn’t often leave. It is long and narrow, and there’s a bedspread covering a sliding glass door to a patio, so no light enters, making the place seem like a monk’s cell or a cave. Once, when I thought he was away, I called to convey a message, and he answered and said, “I’m here. Where else would a caveman be but in his cave?”

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Cat Mom Hugs Baby Kitten

[ed.  This seems to be the meme of the week.]

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The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

by Devin Leonard

Phillip Herr looks like many of the men who toil deep within the federal government. He wears blue suits. He keeps his graying hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He has an inoffensively earnest manner. He also has heavy bags under his eyes, which testify to the long hours he spends scrutinizing federal spending for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency where he is Director of Physical Infrastructure Issues. As his title suggests, Herr devotes much of his time to highway programs. But for the past three years he has been diagnosing what ails the U.S. Postal Service.

It's a lonely calling. "Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan," laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. "Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There aren't many."

Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. "It's one of those things that the public just takes for granted," he says. "The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that's it."

He is struck by how many USPS executives started out as letter carriers or clerks. He finds them so consumed with delivering mail that they have been slow to grasp how swiftly the service's financial condition is deteriorating. "We said, 'What's your 10-year plan?' " Herr recalls. "They didn't have one."

Congress gave him until the end of 2011 to report on the USPS's woes. But Herr and his team concluded that the postal service's business model was so badly broken that collapse was imminent. Abandoning a long tradition of overdue reports, they felt they had to deliver theirs 18 months early in April 2010 to the various House and Senate committees and subcommittees that watch over the USPS. A year later, the situation is even grimmer. With the rise of e-mail and the decline of letters, mail volume is falling at a staggering rate, and the postal service's survival plan isn't reassuring. Elsewhere in the world, postal services are grappling with the same dilemma—only most of them, in humbling contrast, are thriving.

The USPS is a wondrous American creation. Six days a week it delivers an average of 563 million pieces of mail—40 percent of the entire world's volume. For the price of a 44¢ stamp, you can mail a letter anywhere within the nation's borders. The service will carry it by pack mule to the Havasupai Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Mailmen on snowmobiles take it to the wilds of Alaska. If your recipient can no longer be found, the USPS will return it at no extra charge. It may be the greatest bargain on earth.

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Welcome to the Summer Drinking Season

By Alex Balk

Remember how, back at the outset of last summer, you promised yourself that this time you weren't going to let the season go to waste? How you had such ambitious hopes and schemes? And how, seemingly seconds later, Labor Day rolled around and you were all, "Wait! What? I... d'oh!"

Well, that's alright. Summers are meant to be wasted. They are the disposable months of the year during which expectations are low and performance follows accordingly. You're sweaty, you're listless, you're not trying very hard... and it's okay. It's summer! Relax! And you know what? If you're going to waste your summer, you might as well spend your summer wasted. May I suggest a cocktail?

While some opt for the Dark and Stormy, and others plump for the Negroni (with unfortunate consequences), we take a different libation where I'm from. The Official Balk Family Drink of the Summer is, at heart, a gin and tonic, but with one important addition: a splash of Campari.

Too simple, you say? Ah, my friend, you obviously have not had The Official Balk Family Drink of the Summer. While there's nothing wrong with your basic gin and tonic, the splash of Campari... oh, the difference it makes. It is also an excellent test of manliness (if you are a man), since you have to be comfortable enough with yourself to be holding a pink drink throughout the afternoon and into the evening. I probably do not need to do this, but just in case your brain is as fried as mine is right now, here's how you make a gin and tonic with a splash of Campari:

Cowboys and Pit Crews

Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School.

In his book “The Youngest Science,” the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. “If being in a hospital bed made a difference,” he said, “it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference.”

That didn’t stop the interns from being, as he put it, “frantically busy.” He learned to focus on diagnosis—insuring nothing was missed, especially an illness with an actual, effective treatment. There were only a few. Lobar pneumonia could be treated with antiserum, an injection of rabbit antibodies against the pneumococcus, if the intern identified the subtype correctly. Patients in diabetic coma responded dramatically to animal-extracted insulin and intravenous fluid. Acute heart failure patients could be saved by bleeding away a pint of blood from an arm vein, administering a leaf-preparation of digitalis, and delivering oxygen by tent. Early syphilitic paresis sometimes responded to a mix of mercury, bismuth, and arsenic. Surgery could treat certain tumors and infections. Beyond that, medical capabilities didn’t extend much further.

The distance medicine has travelled in the couple of generations since is almost unfathomable for us today. We now have treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousand of diagnoses and conditions that afflict human beings. We have more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, and you, the clinicians graduating today, will be legally permitted to provide them. Such capabilities cannot guarantee everyone a long and healthy life, but they can make it possible for most.

People worldwide want and deserve the benefits of your capabilities. Many fear they will be denied them, however, whether because of cost, availability, or incompetence of caregivers. We are now witnessing a global societal struggle to assure universal delivery of our know-how. We in medicine, however, have been slow to grasp why this is such a struggle, or how the volume of discovery has changed our work and responsibilities.

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Physics and the Immortality of the Soul

The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.

Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being “firmly agnostic” on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.

Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)

Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.

We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

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Franz Kafka, Party Animal

by  Joanna Kavenna

Fiction writing is hardly a glamorous profession. True, novelists avoid the timetables of office work and can cultivate eccentric habits. But if they are going to get anything done, they still have to spend hours of each day hunched over a desk. The tedium of the writer's life means biographers either have to bore their readers senseless or fashion a 'myth' - exaggerating picturesque elements of the writer's personality, embroidering anecdotes and, in the end, rendering the writer as a fictional character. For every major literary figure, there are dozens of myths flying around.

In Excavating Kafka, James Hawes tackles some of the myths that have built up around the writer. He suggests that Kafka is generally touted - both in 'popular culture' and in the worthy avenues of academe - as a gaunt, melancholy, saint-like type, staring out of blurred black-and-white photographs with anguished eyes. He was a man who ordered in his will that his works should be destroyed, who languished in obscurity throughout his lifetime, who was 'crushed by a dead-end bureaucratic job' and, equally, by a tyrannical father. This Kafka was an all-round seer who had no interest in the reception of his work, so preoccupied was he by his 'Kafkaesque' imagination. 'These are the building blocks of the K-myth,' writes Hawes in his introduction. 'Unfortunately, they are all rubbish.'

Hawes, a former academic who spent 10 years studying and teaching Kafka, insists that he was not a 'lonely Middle European Nostradamus'. Rather, he lived with his parents and was set up with a relatively cushy job (six hours a day for the equivalent of £58,000 today), leaving him plenty of time to write. Thanks to his literary connections, he won a major literary prize in his early thirties before even publishing a book. He was not tragically unrequited in his love affairs; nor was he virtually unknown in his lifetime ('we see him named three times in two entirely different articles in a single edition of the Prague Daily News in 1918'). Hawes even proposes that Kafka didn't really want his work to be burned after his death and knew full well that the loyal Max Brod would never do it.

Hawes's Kafka is a canny, funny, worldly man who liked to relax by socialising with his many friends, visiting the occasional prostitute - and reading porn. The fact that Kafka subscribed to two erotic journals is presented as a grand revelation: 'No one has ever shown his readers what we are about to see: Kafka's porn.' There follow some pretty weird pen-and-ink drawings, fin de siècle in style, although Hawes also admits that 'Kafka's porn is no real secret. The mystery is that it should seem like one.' This aspect of the book has caused a furious row to erupt among German-speaking Kafka scholars, with several accusing Hawes of sensationalisation, prudishness and even anti-Semitism.

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Ankle Biters

by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

Network effects. Perhaps no other phrase can get a VC's pulse higher.

They're the holy grail of online business.

What is a network effect? It's what happens when the value of a product to one user depends on how many other users there are, as economists Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian put it.

Examples include Microsoft Windows and the phone network. Windows is valuable because most other software is made for Windows, which makes more people buy Windows, which makes more developers build their apps for Windows, and so on and so forth in a virtuous circle.

Network economics online get people's hearts racing so much for two reasons: first of all, because the internet is at its base a communications network and so network effects tend to happen more there, and second of all, it's one of the few strong barriers to entry in a market where there are so few.  Or is it?

It's taken as a given that network effects online are a magical barrier to entry, but are they?

One reason Facebook is so valuable, we're told, is because of its huge network effects which make it unstoppable and undefeatable.

But Friendster had network effects. So did MySpace. Founding Facebook President Sean Parker says MySpace lost to Facebook because of its gross incompetence. Fair enough.

Except that's not the only way network effects businesses can lose. One way that network effects can be defeated is through what we'll call "verticalization."

Craigslist is perhaps one of the best network effects businesses: the reason why everyone goes there is because everyone is already there. Plenty of people have pointed out how awful Craigslist's design can be, how many things are wrong with it, and yet plenty of well-funded startups that have tried to take Craigslist on frontally with slicker offerings have foundered.

And yet... And yet, Craigslist's traffic seems to be plateau-ing. Why? This graphic by VC Andrew Parker shows why:

click on graphic

While no service has been able to defeat Craigslist head-on, plenty have built "niches" in specific verticals, with a more tailored offering, and now Craigslist seems to be stalling.

And some of these "niches" are big: Etsy, AirBnB and Ashley Madison are huge businesses.

Could the same thing happen to Facebook? We would argue it already is.

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Steves

Steve Jobs

Steve Martin

Steve Speilberg

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Friday Book Club - Readers of the Pack: American Best-Selling

by Ruth Franklin

IN MAKING THE LIST, his 2001 book about best sellers, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda recalls that the publishing house once commissioned a study of which books made the most money. After a detailed presentation, the consultant said to the editors, "Do you guys realize how much money the company would make if you only published best sellers?" He might as well have told them that they'd do better playing the lottery if they picked the right numbers. Trends come and go, but the best seller remains essentially serendipitous. An editor can be no more certain of finding the next one than a writer can be assured of writing it. "As a rule of thumb," writes John Sutherland, an English scholar who has studied the phenomenon, "what defines the bestseller is bestselling. Nothing else."

The term best seller has always been a misnomer. Fast seller would be more appropriate, since the pace of sales matters as much as the quantity. The first list of books "in order of demand" was created in 1895 by Harry Thurston Peck, editor of the trade magazine The Bookman. Publishers Weekly started its own list in 1912, but others were slow to follow: The New York Times did not create its best-seller list until 1942. Now, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today also compile national lists, and each of the major regional papers has its own—all generated in slightly different ways. The Times bases its list on sales reports from around four thousand booksellers, which it declines to name (a column by the paper's public editor a few years ago said only that they change constantly). The Wall Street Journal used to track only sales in major chain stores but now bases its rankings on data from Nielsen BookScan, an authoritative industry source that includes as many as three-quarters of the nation's bookstores, around eleven thousand. IndieBound surveys only independent bookstores. Amazon.com offers its own list, updated every hour, but—like all the others—it is based on orders, not actual sales (since returns are not taken into account). Thus a writer with a carefully timed marketing blitz can push his book to a relatively high Amazon ranking for a day or so, allowing him to claim that it was, say, a "top ten Amazon best seller." The system's vulnerability to manipulation has resulted in the perception that, as Eliza Truitt wrote in Slate, the term best seller on the cover of a book means "about as much as the phrase 'original recipe' does on a jar of spaghetti sauce."

From the start, Peck seems to have had mixed feelings about the arbitrariness of the mechanism he had chosen to anoint books. "The period during which a popular novel enjoys favor is growing shorter all the time nowadays," he wrote in 1902, lamenting "the flood of fiction that is being placed upon the market and vigorously promoted practically every month in the year." While there has never been a defined threshold for making it onto the list—there is no guarantee that a book will be a top ten best seller if it sells fifty thousand copies, one hundred thousand, or even five hundred thousand—both the level and the pace of sales have increased exponentially. (For the sake of simplicity, the statistics in this essay are drawn mainly from the annual ranking of hardcover fiction by Publishers Weekly, which is the most comprehensive historical source.) During the list's first few decades, No. 1 best sellers typically sold about a quarter million copies in the first year after their release. The first superseller, the picaresque novel Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen (1933), sold six hundred thousand copies over its first four years. Its record was promptly beaten by Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), the first book to sell one million copies in a single year. In 1956, Peyton Place by Grace Metalious—still one of the best-selling novels of all time—sold sixty thousand copies within ten days of its publication: It was at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for fifty-nine weeks. Now, each of the top five novels easily sells one million copies in hardcover. The best-selling novel of 2010, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson, sold nearly two million copies last year.

No possible generalization can be made regarding the 1,150 books that have appeared in the top ten of the fiction best-seller list since its inception. There are literary novels by Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, and John Updike. There are social-problem novels, such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). There are war novels: Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (one of the few German novels ever to make the list, in 1929), The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer, 1948), From Here to Eternity (James Jones, 1951). There are religious novels ranging from Lloyd C. Douglas's The Robe (1942) and Leon Uris's Exodus (1959) to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach's 1970 allegory about a bird who yearns for a higher plane of existence. There are westerns by Owen Wister (The Virginian, 1902) and Zane Grey (who published nearly a novel a year from 1915 to 1924). There are sex novels: Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber (1944), with the tag line "Adultery's no crime—it's an amusement"; Peyton Place, which graphically depicts rape and teenage sex; and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966), in which sex comes in second to tranquilizers as a source of pleasure. There are horror novels, with Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin, 1967) and The Exorcist (William P. Blatty, 1971) paving the way for Stephen King's current domination of the field. There is spy fiction and science fiction and—currently the most popular genre—crime fiction. "The bestseller list, from day one, has always represented a reliable mixture of the good and the bad, of quality and trash," Korda writes.

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Fantastic Voyage

 

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Wars, Tax Cuts and Bankers

As of May 6, America's total national debt stood at $14.32 trillion. That somewhat scary number has lots of voters nervous about America's apparent fiscal irresponsibility, and that in turn has resulted in the farcical game of chicken being played over the debt ceiling.

In that context, it's important to realize how we got into this hole in the first place. The chart above, making its rounds on the political blogs this week, is pretty clear. The debt-financed Bush-era tax cuts were the biggest single contributor to our current shortfall. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq account for a hefty chunk, too.

Despite that reality, you still have the people who claim to be most worried about America's money-management problem arguing for extending tax cuts for the highest earners as the solution because, you know, some loose change will eventually fall off those mountains of money they're making.

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What Makes a Great Album Cover

by Molly Tuttle

When I met Simone Rubi in 1999, she was living in Oakland, Calif., a singer in a popular band and working as a graphic designer for ESPRIT. Simone immediately won me over with her delight and appreciation for the design of the simple things in life -- a redwood tree, a tiny mushroom, a perfect wave, hand-knit slippers -- and her ability to ignite others with her enthusiasm and heartfelt propaganda. Over the past decade, I have observed with a smile as I've watched my friend travel the world, arriving in each town like a magnetic Pied Piper, luring together musicians and artists to participate in her never-ending lifestyle of artistic collaboration and celebration of good times.

Simone Rubi. Photo by Mary Rozzi

In 2007, Simone designed the cover for Feist's Grammy-nominated masterpiece, "The Reminder."

For me, this is one of the greatest album covers of all time. In the same spirit of Joni Mitchell's cover for "Ladies of the Canyon," the image captures the spirit of a woman at a particular point in her life, without hitting you over the head with a glamorous beauty shot. The elegant silhouette (shot by Mary Rozzi), the hand-crafted typeface, the sparse yet perfectly executed use of color. The sum of all those parts is one single image that visually exudes the soul of the brilliant collection of songs on the album.

Joni Mitchell's cover art for "Ladies of the Canyon"

Over the past few years since "The Reminder" was released, I have noticed other album covers having a similar feel and I can't help thinking that other designers have been influenced by the work of these inspired ladies. See below.

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