Remains of the Day

Concentrate

Alain de Botton:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

And...

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.

Well played, Bieber

I don't really understand the Justin Bieber phenomenon, but I'm not sure I'm happy about that. It could be my pop culture sensitivity is showing its age.

But it could also be that I was thrown by this surprisingly vicious act of retribution.

Alternate ending for ROTJ

Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz parted ways with George Lucas after The Empire Strikes Back over creative differences. Kurtz felt that merchandise sales were driving the story.

I hadn't read details of Kurtz and Lucas' original outline for Return of the Jedi, but they're intriguing.

“We had an outline and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”

The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.

He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. “So we agreed that I should probably leave.”

Teddy bear luau indeed.

Among the notable names who were among the casting call for Star Wars were John Travolta, Sly Stallone, and Jodie Foster.

Drive All Night

A few Sundays back, I caught The Swell Season at the Hollywood Bowl. That was the fourth time I'd heard them live, and they only get better. Glen Hansard is as charismatic a front man as there is in the music business right now.

Earlier this year, The Swell Season played a benefit show at The Largo at the Coronet for an Ed Norton charity. I lucked into a pair of tix, and it ranks among the top 5 concerts I've ever attended. Small venue, long set, plenty of breathing room between songs for Glen Hansard to charm as the Irish raconteur we all wish we could share drinks with at the pub.

The goosebump moment was their cover of The Boss's "Drive All Night." No recordings of it have been issued, but here's a YouTube video of one of their live performances of the Springsteen track.

Pros versus Joes

[One month since my last post. That may be a record, but it's a sincere measure of the dearth of my free time.]

Apple announced a refresh of its Mac Pros recently, and the response from the professional community was, for the most part, one of weary disappointment. Brook Willard's post titled "The State of Apple's Professional Line" became the unofficial lament around which the pro community rallied.

My old G5 desktop, nearly a decade old, happens to be on its deathbed, and so I happen to be in the market for a desktop. I was waiting for the Mac Pro refresh announcement with some excitement, and it was somewhat of a letdown that so many anticipated upgrades failed to come to pass (more PCI slots was the one I really wanted). I'm a prosumer more than a pro, but my video editing needs are pro-level, as are those of my production team.

When fans lament that a band has sold out, it's often seems like some selfish reflex on the part of fans who'd prefer to feel that their tastes are distinguished by being in the minority. That seems illogical and spiteful if the band hasn't evolved its sound to be more mainstream in nature.

In this case, though, I have empathy for the pro community because their beloved enthusiast brand has shifted its attention to the mainstream. Shareholders won't mind, it's the logical financial moves in this case to address the broadest market possible, especially when even the mainstream products command such healthy margins (often the margin/sales volume disparity between the pro and consumer markets are sharper, but Apple's hardware/software design edge has allowed it to keep high margins on its hardware across the board). I'd love to see continued focus on taking products like Final Cut Pro to the next level, but I'm not hopeful.

Can a company of that size be the brand of choice for both the pro and consumer market? Will there be impacts down the road if there isn't a pro line from which technology can trickle down to more mainstream models?

The fact that Macs could be found in the offices of professionals in the video business always added a certain mystique to the brand, serving as aspirational brand markers the same way runway show outfits that never hit the actual market serve as prestige signals in the fashion world. Will that change?

Espana

Besides being an amusing profile of each World Cup participant, this n+1 preview also called the final champ, Spain (though many had them as the favorite).

The cobbles

It is July, and with it comes a morning ritual for me, watching the Tour de France on Versus. This year, for the first time, I can watch in HD, which makes up for having to get up at 5 to 6am here on the West Coast to catch the action.

Today the Tour covered several sections of the famed Paris-Roubaix course. Its famously brutal pavé, or cobblestone paths, throw a thousand jackhammer jabs at cyclists flying past, beating road bikes used to smooth surfaces into submission.

Among the GC contenders, Lance Armstrong was the most notable big loser today, suffering a front tire pinch flat soon after being stranded behind Frank Schleck's race-ending crash. The combined misfortune cost Armstrong not insignificant time to his two top contenders, Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, and the truth is that we could've seen Lance's chances at winning come to an end already, here in just stage 3.

I love the gritty aesthetic of Paris-Roubaix, and I can't deny the somewhat sadistic appeal of sending professional athletes through the gladiatorial test of the cobbles on such a grand stage. It adds a twist to the already cruel Tour gauntlet. I'm reminded of U.S. Open golf officials letting the rough grow wild and trimming the greens down to glass-like consistency.

At the same time, it doesn't interest me if alterations to playing conditions merely increase randomness of results. A flat tire determining the winner of the Tour de France doesn't interest me as a narrative. I may be exaggerating the impact of Lance's flat, but if the course or challenge is no longer an accurate arbiter of who the best actually are, then we might as well throw darts. If the U.S. Open course, for example, was groomed in a way that it consistently scattered golfers randomly all over the leaderboard rather than filtering the cream of the crop like Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods to contention, I wouldn't judge it to be a good test of golf.

Saxo Bank came out with a great strategy today so I'm not arguing Andy Schleck didn't earn a lot of his advantage today. But if the Tour was decided today, I'd probably find myself agreeing with Jens Voigt who said after the stage that Tour organizers should issue an apology to the riders.

Which type of happiness matters to you more?

More on the relationship between parenting and happiness. Much of interest within. One of the many noteworthy passages:

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.

The article concludes that where you lie on the spectrum of parenting's effect on your happiness depends on which type of happiness you value most, the moment-to-moment sensation or the retrospective variety.

Bread and butter cutter

This short video on how Mariano Rivera has been successful for so long throwing one pitch over 80% of the time explains a lot succinctly. It accompanied this NY Times Magazine profile.

Rivera really is a serene assassin, like Tuco's cousins in Season 3 of Breaking Bad, only not as mean-looking.

Robin Hanson asks: Why do

Robin Hanson asks: Why do we hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians?

Is that true? I liked this suggestion from one of the comments:

I would like to offer a competing explanation for the fact that we treat athletes and musicians differently. Athletes play sports, and to a large extent sports are about winning and losing — in other words, sports are largely (not entirely) about competitive success. People have a strong desire to believe that the world is just, and in a just world success is granted to those who deserve it. Thus through a mix of the just-world fallacy and the halo effect there will be a temptation to build up a mythology around successful athletes, to attribute their success not just to physical gifts but to moral character. Such mythologies are a double-edged sword, however, which is why people felt “betrayed” by Tiger Woods.

That explanation is closest to my guess, though I wonder if that desire for a strong correlation between moral character and achievement is uniquely American, driven by years of movies and tv shows that depicted heroism as a function of virtue. With more and more anti-heroes on TV, perhaps in time that mental model will morph.

I'd be curious to see if that preference differs among age groups. Maybe as one ages, the belief that our athletic heroes are Clark Kent in their spare time fades from years of contradictory empirical evidence from their own lives. Or perhaps the youth of today, having grown up with more anti-heroes in television, are less prone to such hero worship.

Lowering the costs of parenting

Bryan Caplan writes that the negative impact of children on parents' happiness is overstated, but more intriguing to me is his suggestion that parents are working too hard on parenting, with little impact on outcomes for their children. It ties in to a book I read years ago by Judith Harris called The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Harris asserts that parents play a much smaller role than peers in children's emotional and intellectual development.

Caplan extends the idea that micro-managing parents are largely ineffectual. Like Harris, he cites behavioral genetics studies that show that variance in parenting techniques has shown little demonstrable effect on children's morals, happiness, grades, health, etc. But he sees this as a good thing.

Many find behavioral genetics depressing, but it's great news for parents and potential parents. If you think that your kids' future rests in your hands, you'll probably make many painful "investments"—and feel guilty that you didn't do more. Once you realize that your kids' future largely rests in their own hands, you can give yourself a guilt-free break.

If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you're not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job. The same goes for the other dilemmas that weigh on parents' consciences. Watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids' development, so it's OK to relax. In fact, relaxing is better for the whole family. Riding your kids "for their own good" rarely pays off, and it may hurt how your children feel about you.

And if parenting is not as stressful and costly, then he says you might as well consider having more children.

The only part of this thesis that doesn't mesh with my experiential assessment is that first generation Asian parents in the U.S. are notoriously strict with their kids, and growing up I came to accept that as a reason why 1.5 or 2nd generation Asian-Americans like me studied our butts off. Has anyone has done a study to assess whether there's any validity to that theory or whether it's just a myth? I certainly don't have any confidence in just the anecdotal evidence from the childhood experiences of me and other Asian-American peers, but I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand, either.

Media and the social layer

The recent Spotify update added some sweet-looking social features. I say they look impressive because Spotify has yet to release its service in the U.S. With at least four major music labels to negotiate with to get a critical mass of tracks, the woods are thorny indeed, but if they manage to clear that significant hurdle and roll out the following feature set, I'd be ready, at long last, to switch to a subscription service over the model of buying and owning my own music:

Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about the shift of online music to the cloud in a recent issue of The New Yorker. He mentions the usual players (Pandora, MOG, Spotify) and concludes that the age of the computer DJ is upon us.

Similarly, the anonymous programmers who write the algorithms that control the series of songs in these streaming services may end up having a huge effect on the way that people think of musical narrative—what follows what, and who sounds best with whom. Sometimes we will be the d.j.s, and sometimes the machines will be, and we may be surprised by which we prefer.

I think he's partially right. DJ HAL is doing a good job (you can throw Apple's Genius in with those other services), but I still suspect that what Spotify and what I'm sure will be an iTunes cloud-based subscription service will facilitate is the sharing of playlists and discovery among humans. I enjoy MP3 blogs, but I'd much rather follow the lead of musical tastemakers more directly through the same applications I use to listen to music rather than having to read their blogs, go find the music they reference, and then spin those into playlists in iTunes to transfer to my iPod.

Current bandwidths for WiFi and 3G are sufficient to stream music to my iPhone. I'm ready for a cloud-based music subscription service that adds a follower-based social layer (where you can find good tastemakers and choose to follow them even if they don't care to follow you). Such a service is dynamic and ideally improves and changes every time you visit it.

I'm ready for this same revolution to occur in books, too, and with Amazon's latest Kindle app, we're just starting to see the first pebbles of the avalanche skipping by our ankles.

Recently I read David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace on my iPad through the Amazon Kindle app. As I was reading, I noticed some passages had been underlined already. When I clicked on the underlined passage, a box would pop up noting "57 other readers have highlighted this passage".

Ah.

What was frustrating about the battle between Amazon and publishers over digital book pricing was that no one was talking about how to enhance the value of the digital book by capitalizing on what a digital, internet-connected book delivery service could provide, and that is a social reading experience. Publishers were demanding that Amazon charge higher prices for Kindle editions of books, but not once did I read anyone saying how they might justify that price hike by creating something more valuable for the reader.

In college, I hated buying used copies of textbooks, despite the significant price savings, because a book that was marked up and highlighted violated some aesthetic sensibility, especially if the previous owner had highlighted passages I didn't consider important.

But with the Kindle, you can enable highlights and notes to be turned on selectively. To pivot off of David Foster Wallace for a moment, recently the University of Texas acquired the David Foster Wallace archive. DFW was a voracious reader, and besides drafts of his writing the archive contains actual books from his personal collection.

There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,” Schwartzburg said, and noted that Wallace was especially fond of taking notes and compiling vocabulary lists on the inner cover. The collection, heavy on contemporary fiction, contains nearly all of Wallace’s friend Don DeLillo’s novels, including some pre-publication typescripts. Other titles include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and “The Tipping Point,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Strong Motion.” “Unfortunately,” Schwartzburg said, “there does not appear to be a copy of ‘The Corrections.’ ”

There is, however, a paperback copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s pulpy suspense novel “Where are the Children?” “I have no context for it, but it looked like he was doing a rhetorical analysis of how gender relationships were playing out over the course of the novel,” Schwartzburg told me. “He appeared to really engage with her and looked carefully at how she structured her narrative. Clearly, he read very widely.” There’s even a marked-up edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which Wallace circled words like “witenagemot.”

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

I would gladly pay over the usual cover price for a Kindle edition of any of those books if it came with DFW's annotations which I could turn on and off at any time. You can easily imagine a world where readers could insert not just text notes but hyperlinks to web pages or to passages of text from other books, with the option for you to one-click buy the referenced book if you didn't already own it. Digital highlighting isn't ugly, it's something beautiful.

But set aside DFW. What if you could pay for Bill Simmons' annotations on Malcolm Gladwell's books, and vice versa? Or David Remnick's annotations of Barack Obama's autobiography? Or David Sedaris's annotations of Sarah Palin's autobiography? What if authors and other readers could comment on each other's notes and annotations, spawning inline conversations rather than forcing them to occur outside the book on the web?

What if every time you bought a Kindle book, it came with optional new annotations and notes that you could download or subscribe to so that over time, the book increased in informational density? They could be sold as add-ons, also. What if you could subscribe to be notified of new annotations from readers you really enjoyed, like Steven Berlin Johnson or James Wood? What if the people who wrote the annotations got a share of the revenue from the sale of those annotations?

If I'm Amazon or Apple, I'm dead focused on this initiative because the first player to build the tools to easily enable this social layer for their digital book platform gets first mover advantage and some lock-in. Amazon seems to have the early lead, and with the larger digital book library, they'd seem to hold the inside track. But Apple may be okay with ceding the "software" side of the book market to Amazon as Apple has the hardware advantage with the multi-functional iPad.

First editions of classic books are noteworthy for crazy high prices, but I imagine my children buying digital copies of books for more than I paid for them, not because of something as archaic as scarcity but because the the history of conversation and dialogue the book inspired comes attached. It's a story with its own stories.

Suddenly, each book becomes a unique marketplace for ideas. The web still has many many fruits to bear.

Swype

All the press mentions of Swype have me intrigued. Is this method of data entry on touch screen mobile phones, in which you drag your finger around a QWERTY keyboard from letter to letter, really the fastest way to type on a mobile phone?

Swype isn't available for the iPhone, but a similar alternative called Shapewriter was in the iPhone App Store, at least until recently when they were purchased by Nuance Communications. I haven't tried any of these options, and it looks like I'll have to wait a while longer.

Atul Gawande commencement speech

Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford Med School this year. Long-time readers know I am programmed to read everything he writes (The New Yorker really has a murderer's row of regular contributors). His talk hit on many topics he's written or spoken about recently, including health care costs and the complexity of the health profession. The latter was the focus of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, which I read earlier this year. Its thesis: using a simple checklist is one of the most effective ways of coping with the complexity of so many modern challenges.

It sounds almost too mundane a topic for a book, even as slim as it is, but when the costs of a misstep are as high as they are in medicine, it seems negligent to ignore the possibilities. From his commencement speech...

Having great components is not enough. We’ve been obsessed in medicine with having the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists—but we’ve paid little attention to how to make them fit together well. Don Berwick, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has noted how wrongheaded this is. “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,” he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment in which an attempt is made to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo: “What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car; we get a pile of very expensive junk.” Nonetheless, in medicine, that’s exactly what we have done. Earlier this year, I received a letter from a patient named Duane Smith. He was a thirty-four-year-old assistant grocery-store manager when he had a terrible head-on car collision that left him with a broken leg, a broken pelvis, and a broken arm, two collapsed lungs, and uncontrolled internal bleeding. The members of his hospital’s trauma team went swiftly into action. They stabilized his fractured leg and pelvis. They put tubes in both sides of his chest to reëxpand his lungs. They gave him blood and got him to an operating room fast enough to remove the ruptured spleen that was the source of his bleeding. He required intensive care and three weeks of hospital recovery to get through all this. The clinicians did almost every single thing right. Smith told me that to this day he remains deeply grateful to the people who saved him.

But they missed one small step. They forgot to give him the vaccines that every patient who has his spleen removed requires, vaccines against three bacteria that the spleen usually fights off. Maybe the surgeons thought the critical-care doctors were going to give the vaccines, and maybe the critical-care doctors thought the primary-care physician was going to give them, and maybe the primary-care physician thought the surgeons already had. Or maybe they all forgot. Whatever the case, two years later, Duane Smith was on a beach vacation when he picked up an ordinary strep infection. Because he hadn’t had those vaccines, the infection spread rapidly throughout his body. He survived—but it cost him all his fingers and all his toes. It was, as he summed it up in his note, the worst vacation ever.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande tells a great story about Van Halen on tour. In the contract they sent to the people responsible for preparing each arena for their concerts, there was a clause that demanded that a bowl of M&M's with all the brown ones removed be placed in David Lee Roth's dressing room.

Was this because Roth disliked the look or taste of brown M&M's? Was he simply being a prima donna? No. What Roth and his bandmates were doing was sending a canary into the coal mine. Their sets were so large and complex that any lack of attention to detail on the part of those assembling the equipment could endanger Roth and his bandmates, not to mention people in the audience. If Roth walked into a dressing room and saw a brown M&M, how could he be certain the contractors didn't miss other more critical instructions in the contract?

Over time, I've become particular sensitive to how much of what appears to be spontaneous excellence is the result of methodical rehearsal. I used to go to comedy sets from my favorite comedians at the Largo at the Coronet every time they appeared on the calendar, but I learned over time to only attend every few months because comedians would come in and test the same jokes or subtle variations on the same jokes over and over and over.

Aziz Ansari's MTV Movie Awards jokes? I heard almost all of them at the Little Room next door to the Largo about a month before the show aired. Rather than diminishing my respect for stand-up, though, it heightened my appreciation of the profession as a craft. I can't stand listening to talks from people who just read off of their Powerpoint slides because they haven't rehearsed their presentation once. Do people really think Steve Jobs just gets up at Apple presentations and shoots from the hip?

At the end of this long digression, the last item on my checklist to tick off is this: Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto is a worthwhile read.