Remains of the Day

Michael Pollan's letter to Obama

This is hardly a new article, but I'm so busy that I don't ever get to reading issues of the New Yorker or NYTimes until weeks, sometimes months later.

In the food issue of the NYTimes Magazine from Oct 9, Michael Pollan pens an open letter to the President-Elect urging for a reform in U.S. food policy. It is one of the best articles I've read all year, appropriate for both those already familiar with food policy and those who don't know the first thing about where the food on their dinner plate comes from.

Pollan's thesis:

There are many moving parts to the new food agenda I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.

The most fascinating part of the article is Pollan's history of how our current food production system came to be.

After World War II, the government encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer — ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides. The government also began subsidizing commodity crops, paying farmers by the bushel for all the corn, soybeans, wheat and rice they could produce. One secretary of agriculture after another implored them to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

The chief result, especially after the Earl Butz years, was a flood of cheap grain that could be sold for substantially less than it cost farmers to grow because a government check helped make up the difference. As this artificially cheap grain worked its way up the food chain, it drove down the price of all the calories derived from that grain: the high-fructose corn syrup in the Coke, the soy oil in which the potatoes were fried, the meat and cheese in the burger.

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap, oil-based food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or public-health price, we’re not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production. But as is so often the case, a crisis provides opportunity for reform, and the current food crisis presents opportunities that must be seized.

Pollan goes on to offer a prescription for reform. Highly recommended.

One think I do thank Dubya for

Maybe the only thing: recently he signed into law the Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008. Years too late, for my taste, but better late than never. I'm not sure what the old AMT tax was intended to do, but what it did to me was tax me on exercised stock option value even if I hadn't sold them. Way back in the day of the old Internet stock bubble, that meant paying a ton in taxes on Amazon.com stock that I couldn't sell as an employee.

Of course, later, the stock came back down to earth, conveniently when the window for employee selling opened back up and after the government had bled me dry. Instead of getting my AMT taxes back as a refund, the government kept it all and only allowed me to apply the credit as an offset against capital gains of which I never had enough in the subsequent years to claim much of the credit.

So for some ten years, the government has had a big interest free loan from yours truly. So forgive me if I'm not feeling so generous about funding bailouts of mismanaged banks and those dinosaurs in Detroit.

The relevant clauses of the next tax act, for those dot-commers affected:

• Increase of AMT Refundable Credit Amount for Individuals with Long-Term Unused Credits for Prior Minimum Tax Liability. The Extenders Act changes the way in which the refundable portion of the "long-term unused minimum tax credit" for a particular tax year is computed, and eliminates the previously applicable phaseout of the credit based on adjusted gross income, potentially increasing the credit available in that year. Individuals with long-term unused minimum tax credits in a tax year ending on or before December 31, 2012 now may receive a refundable credit equal to the greater of (i) 50 percent of the long-term unused minimum tax credit or (ii) the amount, if any, of the long-term unused minimum tax credit determined for the preceding tax year.

• Specific Relief for AMT Attributable to an Incentive Stock Option Exercise. The Extenders Act eliminates any otherwise outstanding liability for tax, penalties and interest attributable to an AMT liability arising from the exercise of any incentive stock option before 2008. In addition, the amount of a taxpayer's long-term unused minimum tax credit described above that is allowed as a refund in each of 2008 and 2009 is increased by 50 percent of any interest or penalty paid by a taxpayer that would have been abated by the Extenders Act if it had not already been paid.

Design matters

Gregg Rapp is a menu engineer. He designs menus to increase restaurant profitability.

The first step is the design. Rapp recommends that menus be laid out in neat columns with unfussy fonts. The way prices are listed is very important. "This is the No. 1 thing that most restaurants get wrong," he explains. "If all the prices are aligned on the right, then I can look down the list and order the cheapest thing." It's better to have the digits and dollar signs discreetly tagged on at the end of each food description. That way, the customer's appetite for honey-glazed pork will be whetted before he sees its cost.

Also important is placement. On the basis of his own research and existing studies of how people read, Rapp says the most valuable real estate on a two-panel menu (one that opens like a magazine) is the upper-right-hand corner. That area, he says, should be reserved for more profitable dishes since it is the best place to catch--and retain--the reader's gaze.

Cheap, popular staples--like a grilled-chicken sandwich or a burger--should be harder to locate. Rapp likes to make the customer read through a mouthwatering description of seared ahi tuna before he finds them. "This is akin to the grocery store putting the milk in the back," he says. "You have to walk by all sorts of tempting, high-priced items to get to it."

The adjectives lavished on a dish can be as important as the names of the ingredients. What would you rather eatplain grilled chicken or flame-broiled chicken with a garlic rub? Scrambled eggs or farm-fresh eggs scrambled in butter? "Think 'flavors and tastes,'" Rapp says, repeating a favorite mantra. "Words like crunchy and spicy give the customer a better idea of what something will be like." Longer, effusive descriptions should be reserved for signature items. Especially the profitable ones.

From the studio that needs no introduction

Pixar is great, we all love Pixar. But their past several trailers have all started with a long vanity reel: "Over the years..."

If there is one studio that needs no introduction, it is Pixar. They could flash the company logo and Luxo at the start and go straight into the trailer and people would be sufficiently thrilled for a new Pixar production. There's a hint of flashing the bling with their intro reels that seems unnecessary.

Marathon Man

I was in NYC the first weekend of November to watch my brother James run his first marathon. It was a true family affair as James ran for Fred's Team to raise money for Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where my other brother Alan works. James raised something like $13,000, just an amazing amount.

I flew in late Thursday night. The next day, while James was off at work, I got up and just walked around. New York City is still my favorite among all the cities I've lived in, and I suspect it's because it's the one city where I can feel both alone and among people at the same time.

I stopped for lunch at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, one of the outlets in the David Chang empire. Back when I lived in NYC, I came here on its first day open, when they still didn't have a menu. It was like a burrito bar back then, and when I walked in the one guy behind the kitchen counter looked surprised to see anyone. Now it's transformed into a fairly chic sit-down joint with a menu and prix fixe lunch. I had crispy pork belly buns...

...and spicy rice cakes.

It was Friday, Halloween, but more importantly, it was the last day of the Banksy exhibit in the West Village, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. I managed to get there just about a half hour before it closed.

Banksy is to the art world as Michel Gondry is to music videos, just conceptually brilliant. This faux pet store wasn't populated with the real animals. Instead, there was a depressed and caged Tweety...

...a caged animatronic monkey wearing headphones, clicking on a remote control, and watching a TV playing a documentary about monkeys free in the wild...

...a rabbit looking in a mirror and applying lipstick...

...animatronic fish fingers swimming in fishbowl...

...and animatronic sausages squirming around like earthworms.

A leopard fur coat basked in a tree branch, its "tail" hanging down and swaying lazily. A rooster watched over its children, little Chicken McNuggets with legs bobbing for food.

Not Banksy's most subtle social commentary, but a humorous conceit executed simply. According to the security guard, the exhibit was on its way to London next.

That night I caught a production of David Mamet's Speed the Plow at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway. This three person meditation on the conflict between art and commerce in Hollywood starred Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson on Mad Men), and Raul Esparza.

Bashing Hollywood for favoring money over art is hardly an original form of cynicism, but the underrated Piven is always fun to watch on stage. He plays a character not so unlike his Ari Gold from Entourage: Bobby Gould is a studio exec tasked with making commercial hits. When Elizabeth Moss, a temp secretary, playing someone not unlike her Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men, appeals to his conscience to push for an adaptation of a dense and decidedly depressing novel (for some reason I thought of Blindness by Saramago), the battle for his soul is on, with Raul Esparza playing the devil on his shoulder, having brought Gould a made-to-order action script with a big star attached.

Piven has a way of making greed warm and fuzzy. His Ari Gold and Bobby Gould both talk a game of mindless materialism, but the body language conveys a person not entirely comfortable with all the bravado. We see in Piven our own greedy nature, but because we sense his chance for redemption is our own, and so we root for him. Tony Soprano and Don Draper are part of a recently crowded stable of antiheroes, and Piven is like their comedic brother.

After the play, I set off to my old neighborhood haunt of Union Square. I'd read that there would be a flash mob of Sarah Palin look-a-likes this Halloween night, but only a few materialized. Dagmar and Alex, two other folks from UCLA Film School were in town for a thesis shoot, so I met up with them and followed them around, taking pics of Dagmar with costumes that struck her fancy. We snapped a lot Palins, among others. But the most popular costume, by far, perhaps for ease of creation, was Heath Ledger's smudged-lipstick-and-white-face-paint Joker.

The night ended, as many busy social days in NYC end, with my sister Karen hobbling in pain alongside me at 3am in her Audrey Hepburn circa Breakfast at Tiffany's high heels, the two of us trying and failing to find a single unoccupied taxi in Greenwich Village.

The night before the marathon, we all stayed at the Westin in Times Square as James and all the Fred's Team runners were put up there for their fundraising efforts. They got their own transportation to the start line.

The family met up to watch him at the Fred's Team viewing bleachers on 1st Ave., near 67th St, around mile 17. We saw the wheelchair division fly by. One man in a wheelchair stopped across the street, attached a pair of artificial legs below his knees, and ran. The competitive women and then the competitive men flew by, and we saw both eventual winners in those groups.

Thanks to the marathon's e-mail alerts, we knew when James was approaching. As he ran by, giving Alan and the kids a quick hug, I shouted out to him to "Drop the hammer!" He looked back, then down at the street, puzzled, thinking I'd said that he'd dropped something.

We tried to make it across town to the finish line to catch him, but he was too fast. He'd already finished in an impressive 3:57 by the time we waded through the Central Park mob.

Congrats, on both the great time and the amazing fundraising haul! Each speaks volumes, one to his obsessive nature, the other to his likability.

My favorite Sarah Silverman joke from her show tonight

So, we have a new President. Yes, isn't it great? I got to attend a fundraiser recently, and afterwards, I went over to talk to him, and I wanted to ask him a question, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I said, "Senator Obama, when you were at school at Harvard, did you encounter any racism?"

He took a long look at me, and then he said, "I'm Kanye West."

There's more, and it's darker, and I'm too much of a prude to print it here.

NYTimes shutters Play magazine

Too bad. Play had become one of my favorite quarterly publications in the NYTimes. I'd rather have Play than their quarterly Fashion or Travel magazines. That they couldn't round up enough advertisers to justify a quarterly publication is surprising to me.

Which is why it saddens me to tell you that Play is closing shop, a victim of the ailing economy crippling all businesses these days. We had such grand plans for Play in 2009, and the regret runs deep; Play has been the kind of publication one doesn't get to create much anymore. But we're grateful to have had the chance to make this magazine, and to have had such a rich relationship with so many devoted readers. Believe me, you'll be missed.

John Ziegler

Here's a transcript of an interview between Nate Silver and right wing kook John Ziegler about a Zogby poll that Ziegler commissioned. Ziegler uses a lot of foul language, a lot of it daring Silver to post the transcript. So Silver did.

Ziegler was the subject of a David Foster Wallace essay that ran in The Atlantic and that was anthologized in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. On hearing that DFW had committed suicide, Ziegler posted an entry at his website that confirms the sunny personality that comes through in the Silver transcript.

I know that it is considered bad form, or worse, to speak ill of the newly dead, but to me all bets are off when one commits suicide, especially when that person is a husband and a father (speaking of bad form, when did the news media change their rule about not reporting extensively on the suicides of marginally famous people?). I strongly believe that a large ingredient of the toxic mix that ended up forming Wallace’s self-inflicted poison was the pressure he felt of living up to the hype surrounding his writing and the guilt he must have felt for not really having the true talent to back up his formidable reputation.

While I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion, I also think it is quite possible that he knew that killing himself in his “prime” and before he had been totally exposed as being a mere mortal in the literary realm would cement his status as a “genius” forever. After all, don’t tortured artists often kill themselves? Heck, based on the glowing and reverential reporting on his suicide, in some circles ending his on life may actually be seen as a badge of honor.

Stay classy, John.

Idiot.

Buffalo

Wikipedia entry on an odd but grammatically correct sentence:

Buffalo buffalo, Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are

* c. the city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named "Buffalo"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;

* a. the animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes" or "buffalos"), in order to avoid articles (a noun);

* v. the verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives

Buffalo (c) buffalo (a) Buffalo (c) buffalo (a) buffalo (v) buffalo (v) Buffalo (c) buffalo (a).

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.

Bison from Buffalo, New York, who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.

THE buffalo FROM Buffalo WHO ARE buffaloed BY buffalo FROM Buffalo ALSO buffalo THE buffalo FROM Buffalo.

Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report

Here's the interview. Gladwell tolerates Colbert's usual constructed preening with a bemused detachment.

Let bygones be bygones

The Guardian reports that Hillary Clinton will accept Obama's offer for her to be the Secretary of State.

Nate Silver doesn't think it makes sense for Clinton to accept if she wants to use it as a stepping stone to the Presidency. The important question to me is whether she's make a good Secretary of State.

Obama's surrounded himself with an intriguing staff. It is said of him that he likes to surround himself with varied and often dissenting thinkers, so as to help him clarify his thinking on issues. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at his staff meetings.

Michael Lewis on the end of Wall Street

Good read in Portfolio from the author of Liar's Poker on perhaps finally witnessing the end of Wall Street that he'd forecast after his days at Salomon Brothers.

Both Lewis and James Surowiecki of The New Yorker emphasize that one of the amplifiers of this recent financial blood bath was the decision of investment banks to go public. Surowiecki wrote:

All, then, seemed good. But, for Wall Street firms, going public was a deal with the devil, because it meant exposing themselves to what was, in effect, a minute-by-minute referendum, in the form of the stock price, on the health of their operations. This was fine as long as things were going well—the higher the stock price, the richer everyone got—but, once things started to go bad, that market referendum started to look like a vote of no confidence. And that made the problems that the companies were already facing much, much worse.

That’s because the entire edifice of Wall Street is built on confidence. Investment banks rely on short-term debt to run their businesses, and their businesses consist of activities—trading, dealmaking, money management—that depend on people’s faith in their ability to honor their obligations. As soon as the customers and creditors of a company like Lehman start to wonder whether it might collapse, they become less willing to lend or to trade, and more likely to demand their money back. The perception of weakness exacerbates the reality of weakness. And although there are myriad measures of a company’s health, nothing looks scarier than a stock price that’s heading toward zero.

All companies, of course, worry about how their stock is doing. But for most the stock price is a product of performance, rather than a cause of it. If Procter & Gamble’s stock plummeted tomorrow, people would still keep buying Tide. By contrast, if an investment bank’s share price tumbles, it not only wrecks people’s confidence but also can lead to credit-rating downgrades, which provoke a further decline in the stock price, and so on. The downward spiral can be stunningly fast and near-impossible to escape. Lehman’s assets were not significantly more toxic last Monday, when the company filed for bankruptcy protection, than they had been a week earlier. And, technically speaking, the bank may not even have run out of money, since it had access to an emergency liquidity line from the Federal Reserve. What Lehman did run out of was credibility. It couldn’t remain a going concern because creditors and customers no longer trusted it. Why would they, when its stock price had fallen nearly eighty per cent in the previous week? The less faith the market had in the possibility of Lehman’s survival, the more remote that possibility became.

One of the risks of going public is having your stock price govern your decision-making as a company. Managing the morale of employees becomes more difficult. Even if things are going well for the company, if the stock price is low, attrition becomes a concern.

Going public isn't just about cashing in on stock options, as someone once noted about free lunches.

Like a Wii OS

A video demo of a Minority-Report-like interface.

In the near-term, for us classical music aficionados, I'd love a Rock Band-like game for the Wii or another console that allows me to control an orchestra by waving a baton-controller. True, it would be a niche game, but I'd pay a premium for that.

The sacrifices of office

One casualty of Obama's victory in the Election: e-mail and his Blackberry.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

How crazy is it that the most important leader in the country can't use e-mail?

Old interview with David Simon

An old but good interview with David Simon (The Wire) in The Believer.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

***

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

***

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time—hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor—but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built. Think again, motherfuckers.

NYMag Profile of Malcolm Gladwell

Another profile of Malcolm Gladwell, this with his next book Outliers: The Story of Success set to release Tuesday.

Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

Much of the criticism of Gladwell -- that he pilfers other people's ideas and simply renders them understandable for the lay person -- makes him sound like just a really good blogger: a gifted polymathic storyteller.

Here's a video of Gladwell's talk at Pop!Tech this year, one focused on the findings from Outliers.

Top 10 irritating phrases

Oxford's list of top 10 irritating phrases:

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It's a nightmare
8. Shouldn't of
9. 24/7
10. It's not rocket science

Throw in "literally" and the list is complete. While grammatical mistakes are galling, I find verbal tics like "at the end of the day" or "literally" more annoying. Precision of language is precision of thought.

The Evil Pleasure

Robin Hanson on what he terms the evil pleasure:

We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.

He was spurred to this thought by an article by Pascal Boyer in Nature, unfortunately barricaded behind a pay wall. However, you can search for Pascal Boyer articles in Google Scholar. Many are available there for the reading if you click on the "All # versions" link at the bottom of each listing.

Hanson's blog is titled Overcoming Bias, and he's ruthless in that goal. I find his advice stern yet inspiring.

Red announcement

UPDATE: Here's the news. A lot to absorb, but basically, Red is going to turn their entire product line into a modularized model so you can slowly upgrade over time rather than having to buy entirely new cameras over time. The number of sensors from the company is growing like rabbits and will include a 617-sized sensor in the future! Lastly, they're building a Red 3D camera which looks unbelievably cool.

-----

Tomorrow, Red, the digital cinema company, is announcing something big about their upcoming 3K and 5K cameras, Scarlet and Epic. They've posted a countdown timer on their homepage.

Jim Jannard, company founder, has been building up the announcements in the Red user forums.

We will announce the new Scarlet and Epic programs on Thursday Nov. 13th.

I want to say that no one has any idea how incredible this announcement will be. Call this hype... please. I am quite sure that the announcement will be called a "scam". Should be a lot of fun to hear the reactions. I can't wait.

Jim

Not many companies do a better job of publicizing themselves with no PR department than Red. Jannard's honesty and participation in user forums is refreshing.

This week's New Yorker

This week's issue of the New Yorker is entirely online for free. Usually, only some articles are posted online.

The subjects this week? Malcolm Gladwell dissects the comeback of the Wildcat offense, Alex Ross delves into the musical influences of the Gears of War 2 score, and...

...oh, okay, it's an issue mostly about Obama.

Had enough of this Election yet? No? Me either.

West Wing, the real world edition

In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.

From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:

Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.

Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."

Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.

The Royal Emanuels

Tennenbaums for the real world: Rahm, Zeke, and Ari Emanuel are one intriguing set of brothers.

Rahm Emanuel is Obama's new Chief of Staff and said to be part inspiration for Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman on The West Wing.

Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood agent that inspired Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold on Entourage.

Zeke Emanuel is the chair of the department of bioethics at the NIH, an oncologist with a Master's degree from Oxford, an MD from Harvard, and a PhD in political philosophy from Harvard. Yeah, I know, what a loser.

This can be found in a profile in the Washingtonian.

Here's a profile in the NYTimes. In it is this legendary story:

The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remeber it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

''Dead!'' he screamed.

The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''

Here they are on Charlie Rose.

Airing the dirty laundry

Just a day after the Election was decided, McCain campaign aides have come out and admitted that they had little faith in Palin's preparation to be VP (whether or not stories like not knowing the countries in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent are true, a lot of the public had already decided based on the Gibson and Couric interviews that she deserved a No Hire). They basically hid the truth from the public to try to avoid admitting they'd made a mistake not vetting her. They were willing to put an unqualified candidate one heart attack from the most powerful position in the world simply in the name of party unity.

If true, a truly irresponsible act. Country first, huh?

If not true, and it's just scapegoating, it's still sad, though on a smaller scale. Playing the blame game via anonymous leaks to the press are the appropriate capstone to this unsuccessful campaign.

In Nate Silver we trust

In his spare time, just as a hobby, Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight.com, built a model to predict the election, and just absolutely nailed it. He missed only on Indiana, which Obama won by a just .9% of votes. Just about everywhere else, he was spot on, including the popular vote, and so far, the Senate Prediction. His model for the Election was even more accurate than his PECOTA model for baseball, and I used that to win a fantasy baseball league this year.

I hope newspapers and professional journalism don't die as they invest the time in long-lead, high-investment pieces that the web doesn't seem to devote enough attention to. But the web has absolutely accelerated the speed with which smart people like Silver can come to national prominence, and that is a beautiful thing. If Silver had had to fight his way up some newspaper hierarchy for a spot on the front page of the politics coverage, he would've been waiting a long time.

Incidentally, Silver analyzes the data and finds a correlation between Obama's contact rate advantage in key battleground states and his outperformance of polls in those states. He estimates "each marginal 10-point advantage in contact rate translated into a marginal 3-point gain in the popular vote in that state."

The state where had the greatest contact rate advantage? Nevada, where he had an advantage of 21%, 50% to 29%.

So those of you who made your way out to Nevada on your own dime, some driving down from distant cities like San Francisco, to go knock on doors and rally, you made a difference.

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

Ah, The Onion.

African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

***

Barack Obama, or at least his campaign photographer, maintains a Flickr account. Yet another reason Obama is the young people's choice. I'm not sure McCain has even heard of Flickr.

The latest set of pics is from Election Night. Here he is, watching TV on Election Night. Here he is, doing his famous point. If you were the recipient of said point, it must feel like receiving one from Michael Jordan after a nice play.

Ah, to be so telegenic. Also, how does one get to be Obama's campaign photographer? That's a guaranteed path to a coffee table book in 8 or 9 years.

***

A mostly unrelated sidenote: this morning, our kitchen sink clogged up and then spewed up what seemed to be sludge. It smells terrible. I blame Joe the Plumber for neglecting his duties, and I pray my apartment will fix this problem soon so I can use my kitchen again.

Someday we'll look back and laugh that a candidate for the highest office in our land brought Joe the Plumber out on the campaign trail in crucial days of the Election as, well, a prop.

***

Yes, I'm still not Election'd out quite yet, and neither are my sisters and all the volunteers I worked with this campaign season, all of whom have been trading e-mails with me non stop since Tuesday morning. Perhaps we won't stop thinking or discussing politics as long as Obama is in office. Is that such a bad thing? The West Wing is no longer on TV, but maybe we'll bear witness to the real-life version. A citizenship invested in politics for more than one out of every four years? That would be a blessing.

A way to relive the campaign is through this much discussed 7 part series from Newsweek. They were given extensive access in exchange for an embargo until after the Election was decided. Read it now, before it's turned into an HBO miniseries.

***

Obama iPhone wallpapers. My wallpaper for most of the time I've had my iPhone was a photo from an Obama event at Gibson Ampitheatre here in LA last December. Then, for roughly the past month, my iPhone wallpaper was a photo I took with actress Kelly Hu while canvassing for Obama in Las Vegas (if you have to ask, you probably don't know what she looks like, and besides, she was out with us canvassing and rallying, so she's ace in my book).

I thought I'd be ready for a non-Obama-themed wallpaper now that he'd won the Election, but no, I'm going to choose one of these from Flickr for my phone for just a while longer.

***

DailyKos breaks down exit poll data to assess the Election vote by age and race. The younger the voter, the more the skew towards Obama, but he won the 18-29, 30-44, and 45-64 age groups. Only the 65+ demo went McCain.

As for race, McCan won the white vote, the largest bloc by far at 74% of the voting pool, by 55% to 43%. But Obama won the African-American, Latino, Asian, and Other categories, all by more than 60%, and that carried it for him.

As for turnout, the estimate is that 64% of the voting-age population voted on Tuesday. That would be the highest turnout since women got the right to vote in 1920.

***

Jumping back to Tuesday's Indecision 2008 special, I noted yesterday that I found out that Obama had become President Elect, officially, at the end of that special. I sent it to Joannie, and she was moved that Colbert started to cry. When I wrote, as the title of my post, "When Colbert Wept", I meant it facetiously, as I thought he was pretending to be choked up in character (it's also a reference to a book titled When Nietzsche Wept which I read a long time ago).

But on yesterday's Daily Show, Chris Wallace makes reference to Colbert and Stewart crying when they found out Obama had won...

And so I went back and watched that moment when they announced Obama as the President, and it does seem like Colbert is fighting back some emotion (they say women are better readers of emotion, and Joannie has a higher Emotional IQ than I do). Even if Colbert isn't overwhelmed by the moment, I'd just like to think he is, because who didn't tear up a bit when Obama walked out onto that stage with his family? Maybe Obama is the only person cool enough to take it in stride, but I was bobbing at sea in tidal waves of emotion.

What do you think? Did Colbert drop out of character for just a beat?

Getting that coveted copy of the NYTimes

Sadly, I was shut out of getting a copy of the NYTimes yesterday, like many people. A note on their website today:

[Note to readers: Copies of Wednesday's paper were again available for the $1.50 cover price Thursday at Times headquarters, at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 40th and 41st Streets, until they run out. Commemorative editions may be ordered online or at 1-800-671-4332 for $14.95, which includes shipping and handling.]

Alas, the phone line is overwhelmed and not fielding calls right now, and that online link times out. If you're in the pipeline and get a timeout, the store also annoyingly redirects to the NYTimes.com front page for no good reason. Oh, if only Amazon could fulfill everyone's orders; clearly the NYTimes Store has the capacity to handle very little order volume.

Among Obama's many powers we can add the ability to temporarily revive a moribund business.

So we all can fly

Jay-Z on this Election:

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk.

Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run.

Obama's running so we all can fly.

And Colbert wept

At 7:59pm PST last night, I was watching TV with my roommate, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central, already feeling certain about victory. But none of the networks had called it yet. And then, at that moment, just as Indecision 2008's hour of programming was up, there was this:

One of the greatest moments I've ever seen live on TV.

The Big Picture

You just knew The Big Picture would have some great shots of our next President.

Obama is the coolest cat wherever he goes. He never looks anything less than like some cinematic dream of a President. It's almost surreal that he is actually our next President.

That photo of McCain with his tongue out at the end of that last debate, all those pics of his eye-rolls and tongue juts, I don't recall a single photo of Obama like that. I half expect Obama came out of the womb not crying but giving fist bumps to his doctor and mother and pointing to nurses in the delivery room to thank them for their work.

That photographic contrast is just one of the many factors that fed into this landslide. One of the candidates looked like the guy you wanted to lead you out of the crisis, while the other looked like the hothead who would've gotten you into it.

The Onion, The Chicago Tribune

Headline: Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress

Half satire, half brutal truth.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

My sister wrote me an e-mail this morning to let me know that the Chicago Tribune sold out in 20 minutes. She was at a sundry shop in her office when someone walked in with 10 papers, and she slide tackled and roundhouse-kicked a few people to grab a few copies. I'm going to frame that baby.

Some notes on a historic day

How is it that so many politician's best speeches are their concession speeches? Gore, Kerry, and now McCain gave their most heartfelt and moving speeches after their dreams for the White House had come to an end.

That was the McCain that held such appeal to so many independents back in 2000. It took the duration of this election battle, but McCain finally found grace in defeat at the end.

***

The youth vote? A record turnout. One of the few sad moments for me this night was realizing I'm not considered part of the youth vote anymore. But I am grateful towards the 18-29ers tonight. That was the only age segment in which Obama won a majority of the white vote.

***

Sarah, you get back up there and, uh, keep an eye on Putin.

***

Obama gave his speech in Chicago behind giant panes of bulletproof glass. I confess, it was reassuring to see those in place.

***

Hey Joe. Here's a plunger. Get back to work.

Oh, and some of those toilets? You clogged them with all your crap.

***

If you consider America as a brand, then in one day it has improved its standing in a way that any corporation would kill for.

From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

As the sun rises in the rest of the world, Twitter's Election 2008 page is now shifting to more than 50% of tweets in foreign languages. I confess I can't read many of these, but it seems like the world is very happy about Obama's election.

***

In Clark County in Nevada, where I canvassed with dozens of other Obama volunteers, Obama won in a landslide. It's hard to tell when you're on the ground how things are going, but all evidence pointed to the fact that the Obama ground game there blew McCain's out of the water. Some people whose doors I knocked on mentioned that they'd been visited three, four times by the Obama campaign, whereas they'd yet to even see a McCain volunteer anywhere.

Walking door to door in that Las Vegas desert heat? All worth it.

***

Among the people who became big big stars this Election:

Sarah Palin - for good or bad, she went from a Governor known only to Alaskans and DC insiders to one of the most recognizable faces in politics and a pop culture icon. Among those who rode the Palin coattails to even greater success: Tina Fey, whose physical resemblance to Palin was an unexpected blessing, and Kazuo Kawasaki, whose Kawasaki 704 glasses became, overnight, a coveted fashion accessory for women.

Rachel Maddow - a liberal, but not an adoring Obama fangirl, and so she managed to carve out a role as the most postpartisan of MSNBC's Election coverage team.

Nate Silver - near and dear to my heart, Baseball Prospectus's predictive modeling guru surprised every one by revealing himself as the mastermind behind go-to Election polling aggregation site FiveThirtyEight. His prediction for this Election, issued earlier today, before any numbers had come in:

By the time the final numbers come in, he is going to be really close to having nailed it. Obama should find a role for Nate in his Administration, though we baseball fans would be sad to lose his PECOTA prediction model.

***

Seeing Jesse Jackson in Chicago at Obama's victory speech, with tears streaming from his eyes, I forgave him for the occasional backstabbing. Not too many images better encapsulated the joy that African-Americans must feel at this historic milestone in their centuries-long struggle for equality.

Obama said in his A More Perfect Union speech, "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." It meant something then. But it's never rung as true as it did today.

Barack Obama, the next President of the United States

We did it.

In 2004, my sister Joannie and her husband Mike worked for the Barack Obama campaign for Senate in Illinois. Karen canvassed for Obama in Pennsylvania. I worked with a local Obama office here, smiling and dialing to voters in swing states, and then canvassed in Nevada.

Supporting our hometown boy Obama has been a family affair. So when I say "we did it," I am writing about how we feel, and how every Obama volunteer feels, as part of a much improved ground game, one I think can be even stronger the next time around.

Sure, McCain was behind the eight ball given how poorly Bush ran the Republican Party into the ground, but I feel no sympathy for those who elected Dubya a second time.

And so the United States of America has its first black President. Has a black man or woman ever been president of a country in which blacks are a minority?

President Obama, you can start measuring the drapes now.