longreads

David Graeber on the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

David Graeber is a professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In a must-read, thought-provoking post titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” he explains how the majority of workers these days are stuck in meaningless jobs:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

So what happened as a result of global automation?

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

So was Keynes wrong? No, argues David Graeber, in this humorous paragraph:

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

On meeting people with bullshit jobs in real life:

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely.

On the perverse notion that this status quo should endure:

It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

A must-read in its entirety. Thought-provoking.

The Perils of Captivity of India’s Celebrity Elephants

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A really sad piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine profiles a few celebrity elephants in India and the perils of captivity that they endure.

The captivity of elephants in south India goes back thousands of years. At first their use was mostly practical — tanks in wartime, timber forklifts in peacetime. In Kerala, elephants have been status symbols since the feudal era, and today most of its captive elephants are owned by private individuals. And it’s the only state in India where elephants are widely used for temple festivals. When or why this tradition started is unknown — no scripture commands it — but you can imagine how it may have happened: elephants were housed at temples between battles and were gradually integrated into religious festivities. Eventually, as soldiers and loggers replaced their elephants with machines, festivals became the best way owners could turn a profit on such high-maintenance animals.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Twenty years ago, Kerala elephants would appear only at whatever festivals were within walking distance, and few elephants were famous. Now they’re trucked all over the state to the highest bidder, the price driven up every year by the enthusiasms of the superfans who form associations to honor their favorite animals, urge festival organizers to feature them and trash-talk the competition. “You call that an elephant?” they write on their rivals’ Facebook pages. “Go tie him up in the cow barn.” The fans are especially concerned with what’s called lakshanam — a term that elephantspotlight.com defines as “the sexy features of the elephants.” A fan named Sujith told me: “The ivory should be clean white. The tail should be like a brush, and the trunk should reach the ground.” (Sujith’s own favorite elephant, he said, was out of commission this season: he was hit in the hind legs by an S.U.V.)

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Although most elephant festivals in India are Hindu, Kerala is unusual in that its population is a quarter Muslim and a fifth Christian, and those faiths have jumped on the elephant bandwagon, too. At a Muslim festival I went to, rowdy young men rode up and down the road throwing confetti from the 60-odd elephants they rented — some of the same elephants that carried idols at Hindu temples the day before.

There is a conflict among India’s population on what should be done to protect these elephants:

…the solution to the harm inflicted on and by elephants is self-evident: their captivity should be banned — or at the very least, elephants should no longer be used in festivals. Tradition or not, they’re wild animals that belong in the forest. But Raman Sukumar, the founder of the Asian Nature Conservation Foundation and perhaps the world’s leading expert on Asian elephants, says it isn’t that simple. Asian elephants have been on the endangered-species list since 1986, yet contrary to trends nearly everywhere else in the world, the wild-elephant population in southern India has actually been increasing over the past several decades, with elephants now living in places where they hadn’t been spotted for hundreds of years. The trouble with this is that deforestation and booming human populations have shrunk and fragmented their habitats, which means elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans — raiding crops, running amok in forest villages. Thirty years ago, Sukumar told me, wild elephants killed around 150 people a year across India. Today it’s closer to 500. When wild elephants exceed the capacity of their habitats, the only alternative to capturing them is culling them, which is to say, shooting them dead.

###

Additional reading:

1) This excellent 2006 New York Times piece titled “An Elephant Crackup?” which highlights how elephants have become more violent, prone to attacking villages and humans.

2) George Orwell’s classic essay “Shooting an Elephant.” One of my favorite works by Orwell outside of 1984.

E-Books vs. Lattes vs. Cigarettes

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A premise in this thoughtful essay by Kaya Genç on the trade-offs between buying coffee or books: What would George Orwell choose: e-books or lattes?

Kaya lives in Istanbul, Turkey where international editions of books and magazine subscriptions are more expensive than the digital counterparts. Upgrading to an e-book reader last year, there are lamentations of this sort:

In the good, old, and expensive days of literary shopping I would choose books from the shelves, walk to the counter, pay in cash, and head to a coffee shop with my purchases — the favorite ritual of my teenage years. I would open the first book’s cover, accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of strong Turkish coffee. These would always be very physical experiences: I remember the crinkling pages, the waft of the smoke, the oils of the coffee. Afterward my hands smelled of nicotine; my mind hungered for more books.

Lately, however, this ritual has all but disappeared from my life. My reading materials have been thoroughly digitized. I have lost touch with both the printed book and the banknote. In the long chronicle of my reading habits I am currently living through the age of the .EPUB file and the plastic card. It is a chilly period, I must admit, a dark age, and at times it makes me yearn for the good old days of my undergraduate life. 

Citing Orwell’s Books v. Cigarettes essay, who pinpointed his spending habits on books vs. cigarettes:

To fully estimate his reading expenses he added to the sum the cost of newspapers and periodicals. Orwell typically read two daily papers, an evening paper, two Sunday papers, a weekly magazine, and “one or two” monthly magazines. He added these and the cost of his library subscriptions. In the end he concluded that his “total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.”

In contrast, he had spent £40 a year on cigarettes. His reading habit was cheaper than his smoking one. The workers had had little reason to complain about the cost of books, he decided. If they were not reading literature it was probably because they found books boring — not because they couldn’t afford them.

In the similar vein, Kaya calculates how much money he spends on coffee vs. e-books:

My e-reading expenditures, then, cost me around $385 — less than my coffee expenditures for the same period, which were in the neighborhood of $1,800. My e-reading habit thus costs only a fifth of my drinking one (maybe a little more when I’m not working on a novel). For every dollar I spent on the likes of Tolstoy I spent four on coffee beans.   

An exercise for the reader: do you spend more on coffee or books/e-books? I will update this post when I finish my own calculations for the year 2013…

Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Michael Lewis’s latest piece for Vanity Fair is an 11,000 examination of how Goldman Sachs acted after finding that one of its ex-programmers, Sergey Aleynikov, allegedly stole computer code. There was a federal trial, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Investigating Aleynikov’s case, Michael Lewis holds a second trial. The entire piece is worth reading, especially the interviews with Aleynikov in which he presents his views on life (quoted at the bottom in this post).

First, this was an interesting anecdote on why Russians are the best programmers on Wall Street:

He’d been surprised to find that in at least one way he fit in: more than half the programmers at Goldman were Russians. Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street, and Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. “In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes,” he says. “When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time.”

A new rule created by the SEC in 2007 called Regulation NMS led to the proliferation of high frequency trading (HFTs):

For reasons not entirely obvious (yet another question for another day), the new rule stimulated a huge amount of stock-market trading. Much of the new volume was generated not by old-fashioned investors but by extremely fast computers controlled by high-frequency-trading firms, like Getco and Citadel and D. E. Shaw and Renaissance Capital, and the high-frequency-trading divisions of big Wall Street firms, especially Goldman Sachs. Essentially, the more places there were to trade stocks, the greater the opportunity there was for high-frequency traders to interpose themselves between buyers on one exchange and sellers on another. This was perverse. The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market. The reality has turned out to be a boom in financial intermediation and an estimated take for Wall Street of somewhere between $10 and $20 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you wish to believe.

Goldman decided to hire Serge Aleynikov to beef up their algorithms to compete with the likes of big hedge funds like Citadel:

A lot of the moneymaking strategies were of the winner-take-all variety. When every player is trying to buy Pepsi after Coke’s stock has popped, the player whose computers can take in data and spit out the obvious response to it first gets all the money. In the various races being run, Goldman was seldom first. That is why they had sought out Serge Aleynikov: to improve the speed of their system.

The article explains how Goldman is a money-making machine, but the appearance of black swan events led many Wall Street firms to lose millions of dollars at the height of the financial crisis, Goldman included:

Day after volatile day in September 2008, Goldman’s supposedly brilliant traders were losing tens of millions of dollars. “All of the expectations didn’t work,” recalls Serge. “They thought they controlled the market, but it was an illusion. Everyone would come into work and were blown away by the fact that they couldn’t control anything at all. . . . Finance is a gambling game for people who enjoy gambling.”

This was probably the most damning paragraph in the piece about Goldman’s relationship with open source software:

But most of his time was spent simply patching the old code. To do this he and the other Goldman programmers resorted, every day, to open-source software, available free to anyone for any purpose. The tools and components they used were not specifically designed for financial markets, but they could be adapted to repair Goldman’s plumbing.

Serge quickly discovered, to his surprise, that Goldman had a one-way relationship with open source. They took huge amounts of free software off the Web, but they did not return it after he had modified it, even when his modifications were very slight and of general rather than financial use. “Once I took some open-source components, repackaged them to come up with a component that was not even used at Goldman Sachs,” he says. “It was basically a way to make two computers look like one, so if one went down the other could jump in and perform the task.” 

On the individualistic (selfish) nature of competition at Goldman, even when efforts were collaborative in nature:

It made no sense to him the way people were paid individually for achievements that were essentially collective. “It was quite competitive. Everyone’s trying to show how good their individual contribution to the team is. Because the team doesn’t get the bonus, the individual does.”

And then we get to the meat of the piece, where Michael Lewis invites people in the HFT industry to come up with their own verdict of whether Serge Aleynikov did something nefarious and/or illegal:

Our system of justice was a poor tool for digging out a rich truth. What was really needed, it seemed to me, was for Serge Aleynikov to be forced to explain what he had done, and why, to people able to understand the explanation and judge it. Goldman Sachs had never asked him to explain himself, and the F.B.I. had not sought help from someone who actually knew anything at all about computers or the high-frequency-trading business. And so over two nights, in a private room of a Wall Street restaurant, I convened a kind of second trial. To serve as both jury and prosecution, I invited half a dozen people intimately familiar with Goldman Sachs, high-frequency trading, and computer programming.

You have to read the piece for the conclusion. As one of the jurors assembled by Michael Lewis says: it was nauseating how Sergey was treated.

One last bit in the informal jury process that caught my attention was Serge’s demeanor and approach to life. Take things as they come; negativity is pointless:

At one point one of the people at the table stopped the conversation about computer code and asked, “Why aren’t you angry?” Serge just smiled back at him. “No, really,” said the other. “How do you stay so calm? I’d be fucking going crazy.” Serge smiled again. “But what does craziness give you?” he said. “What does negative demeanor give you as a person? It doesn’t give you anything. You know that something happened. Your life happened to go in that particular route. If you know that you’re innocent, know it. But at the same time, you know you are in trouble and this is how it’s going to be.” To which he added, “To some extent I’m glad this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about.”

What are your thoughts?

###

There’s a very interesting addendum in Vanity Fair in which Michael Lewis is interviewed about his piece. Here, he shares his personal thoughts on Sergey’s time in prison:

Q: For the past 200, 250 years, prison has been an essential part of the Russian experience. Like Dostoyevsky and other Russian authors, and their heroes, Serge found some sense of purpose in his incarceration. Do you think an American could have come away from the experience with that same perspective?

[Michael Lewis]: In the 1950s, European filmmakers, when their films were going to be made for both a Russian and American audience, would change the ending. They would make a happy ending for the American audience and a tragic one for the Russian audience. There’s a photographer named Tacita Dean who has done a series of photographs called “Russian Endings” where she has played on this. I would say that in some ways, there’s something in the water in Russia that enables you to derive a kind of pleasure from a tragic experience. That is not in the water in America. A kind of richness from a tragic experience. And whatever chemical is in the water, Serge drank plenty of it. He is very persuasive on the subject that this was not an all-together bad experience for him. It woke him up to many aspects of life that he had previously been asleep to. I believe him. I don’t think it’s just superficial rationalizing.

When you’re with him, it’s shocking how without anger or bitterness he is. You would never guess, at the dinners I had, that he was one who spent time in jail. You would have picked every other person there.

Also worth highlighting is financial blogger Felix Salmon on his reaction to Lewis’s piece:

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that America’s system of jurisprudence simply isn’t up to the task of holding banks and bankers accountable for their actions. The only people who ever get prosecuted are small fry and insider traders, rather than the people who really caused the biggest damage. And the lesson of Sergei Aleynikov is that if and when the laws get beefed up, the banks will simply end up taking advantage of those laws for their own vindictive purposes, rather than becoming victims of them. Given the ease with which Goldman got the FBI to do its bidding, one has to assume that, most of the time, the government will be working on the same side as the big banks, rather than working against them. Do we really want to give those banks ever more powerful weapons?

To Steal a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s Lawsuit

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (the only book she’s written), has an outstanding lawsuit. The lawsuit charges that in 2007 her agent, Samuel Pinkus, duped the 80-year-old Lee into assigning him the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird and took away the royalties.

In “To Steal a Mockingbird?” Mark Seal unveils the details of the lawsuit for Vanity Fair:

Filed in New York District Court, the suit names Pinkus, his wife, former TV-news writer Leigh Ann Winick, and Gerald Posner, a Miami-based attorney and investigative journalist with a questionable reputation, as defendants. It claims that Pinkus “engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,” and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled. (The defendants are not accused of stealing her royalties.)

As the emerging scandal rocked the publishing world, I flew to Monroeville and stood in its former county courthouse, now a museum devoted to the town’s two literary sensations, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who were childhood neighbors and lifelong friends. Upstairs in the museum is the courtroom where Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman “A. C.” Lee, tried his cases, and where Harper, as a child, and the character Scout in her novel, watched adoringly from the balcony. Lee thinly disguised Monroeville in the book as Maycomb, “a tired old town…. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.” She gave her father the name Atticus Finch.

This is a huge lawsuit because To Kill a Mockingbird, 53 years after first publication, still sells some 750,000 copies a year, according to HarperCollins, the publisher. In one typical six-month period alone, ending December 2009, Harper Lee earned $1,688,064.68 in royalties. I read the novel in 9th grade (but never re-read it), and it’s still one of my favorite all-time books.

Read the entire story here.

A Handy Guide to Jack Handey and “Deep Thoughts”

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts were pretty popular when I was in college. With that in mind, I found this New York Times piece by Dan Kois a very handy (haha) guide to his development as a joker:

Handey initially had a great deal of difficulty persuading the show’s producers to run “Deep Thoughts,” which he previously published in National Lampoon and in George Meyer’s legendary comedy magazine Army Man. “They were reluctant to give a writer something with his name on it, you know?” Handey said. “The ironic thing, of course, is that people still think Jack Handey is a made-up name.” He submitted the jokes to a read-through, where “Lorne gets his big basket of popcorn, and he reads the stage directions, and then the actors would read the parts.” Joan Cusack read the Deep Thoughts, and, Handey recalled, response was so-so. Still, he kept lobbying for the spot to make the show. “I would go through Jim Downey, and he would take it to Lorne. ” The answer was always the same: “No.” (“Lorne wasn’t as big a fan of them as I was,” Downey remembered.)

“I guess eventually they sort of felt like, let’s throw him this bone,” Handey said. “Deep Thoughts” made its debut on Jan. 19, 1991, in an episode hosted by Sting. It was this gem: “To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time when I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.”

Jack Handey has just published a novel, The Stench of Honolulu. Joke-writing was easier, though: “For each one that works, I throw away 10. I find that easier than rewriting. I’d rather just scrap it and start over. That’s why the novel was so hard — I really had to rewrite things over and over.”

Post-Scarcity Economics by Tom Streihorst

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Tom Streihorst, a filmmaker and writer who publishes articles on finance and economics, pens an excellent essay titled “Post-Scarcity Economics” in The Los Angeles Review of Books:

We fly across oceans in airplanes, we eat tropical fruit in December, we have machines that sing us songs, clean our house, take pictures of Mars. Much the total accumulated knowledge of our species can fit on a hard drive that fits in our pocket. Even the poorest among us own electronic toys that millionaires and kings would have lusted for a decade ago. Our ancestors would be amazed. For most of our time on the planet, humans lived on the knife-edge of survival. A crop failure could mean starvation and even in good times, we worked from sun up to sundown to earn our daily bread. In 1600, a typical workman spent almost half his income on nourishment, and that food wasn’t crème brûlée with passion fruit or organically raised filet mignon, it was gruel and the occasional turnip. Send us back to ancient Greece with an AK-47, a home brewing kit, or a battery-powered vibrator, and startled peasants would worship at our feet.

And yet we are not happy, we expected more, we were promised better. Our economy is a shambles, millions are out of work, and few of us think things are going to get better soon. When I graduated high school, in 1975, I assumed that whatever I did, I would end up somewhere in the great American middle class, and that I would live better than my father, who lived better than his. Today, my son doesn’t have nearly the same confidence. Back in those days, you could go off to India for seven years, sit around in an ashram, smoke pot and seek spiritual fulfilment, and still come home and get a good job as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather. Today kids need a spectacular resume just to get an unpaid internship at IBM. Our children fear any moment not on a career path could ruin their prospects for a successful future. Back in the 1970s, pop stars sang songs about of the tedium and anomie of factory work. Today the sons of laid-off autoworkers would trade anything for that security and steady wage.

Most of us are working harder, for less money and with no job security. My father and I both worked at the same large corporation but there was a difference, a difference determined by our respective eras: he was staff, I was freelance. When he got sick, the company found him doctors, paid his salary, put considerable effort into his recovery. Had I ever gotten sick, they would have simply forgotten my name. He yelled at the CEO habitually without any fear of losing his job. I mouthed off once to a middle manager and was never hired again. He had a defined benefit pension paid for by the corporation, the government gave me a tax break should I choose to save for my own retirement. The company had legal and moral responsibilities to him, which both he and they viewed as sacrosanct. All they owed me was a day’s pay for a day’s work. His generation gave their you to a corporation, and the corporation took care of them in their old age. Today loyalty, if it exists at all, goes just one way. Many of my college buddies, are unemployed at 50, or earning less than they did ten years ago.

He discusses economics in the context of Paul Krugman, Keynes, and Alan Greenspan. Worth a read.

Desert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever Created

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

I’d never heard of Desert Bus before, so I read with fascination this piece in The New Yorker touting it as the worst game ever created. It is remarkable how the game was able to pivot many years after its release and become a major fundraiser for Child’s Play, a charity that donates video games and consoles to children’s wards in hospitals around the world

The drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, takes approximately eight hours when travelling in a vehicle whose top speed is forty-five miles per hour. In Desert Bus, an unreleased video game from 1995 conceived by the American illusionists and entertainers Penn Jillette and Teller, players must complete that journey in real time. Finishing a single leg of the trip requires considerable stamina and concentration in the face of arch boredom: the vehicle constantly lists to the right, so players cannot take their hands off the virtual wheel; swerving from the road will cause the bus’s engine to stall, forcing the player to be towed back to the beginning. The game cannot be paused. The bus carries no virtual passengers to add human interest, and there is no traffic to negotiate. The only scenery is the odd sand-pocked rock or road sign. Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities, making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in gaming.

Fascinating and worth reading in entirety.

On the Difficulty of Writing and Working at Start-Ups

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

James Somers considers the worthiness of coders in Silicon Valley. But it was a section on writing that caught my attention from the start:

When, in 1958, Ernest Hemingway was asked: ‘What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?’, he responded:

Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Writing is a mentally difficult thing — it’s hard to know when something’s worth saying; it’s hard to be clear; it’s hard to arrange things in a way that will hold a reader’s attention; it’s hard to sound good; it’s even hard to know whether, when you change something, you’re making it better. It’s all so hard that it’s actually painful, the way a long run is painful. It’s a pain you dread but somehow enjoy.

Some of this is existential angst that comes with working at a start-up:

When I go to the supermarket I sometimes think of how much infrastructure and ingenuity has gone into converting the problem of finding my own food in the wild to the problem of walking around a room with a basket. So much intelligence and sweat has gone into getting this stuff into my hands. It’s my sustenance: other people’s work literally sustains me. And what do I do in return?

We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads. But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box.

He comes back to the difficulty of writing:

The price of a word is being bid to zero. That one magazine story I’ve been working on has been in production for a year and a half now, it’s been a huge part of my life, it’s soaked up so many after-hours, I’ve done complete rewrites for editors — I’ve done, and will continue to do, just about anything they say — and all for free. There’s no venture capital out there for this; there are no recruiters pursuing me; in writer-town I’m an absolute nothing, the average response time on the emails I send is, like, three and a half weeks. I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars.

And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’

And so he will continue coding, coding, coding. Thoughtful piece.

Murray Goodwin: In Defense of Brooklyn

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

HOLIDAY MAGAZINE was published from 1946 to 1977. A blog I recently discovered is highlighting some of the notable pieces from the magazine over the years. I liked this piece by Murray Goodwin, “In Defense of Brooklyn,” published in 1946:

Where in Manhattan can the hot and tired gentry plunge into the ocean from a six-mile-long frontage of beach? Seek high and low; you’ll find no spot in Man­hattan which can offer so much comfort to so many people as can Coney Island. From Manhattan, from the Bronx, they pour into Brooklyn laden with children, paper bags, vacuum bottles, water-wings, patched inner tubes. In myriad tongues they sing their happiness at finding a square yard of tan sand to plump upon, just spitting distance from the surf, and where the sun may fall on them in warm embrace. Brooklyn, with a heart as big as its body, bids them all to try the breakers in the daytime, or seek a thrill at night aboard the giddy roller-coasters, giant swings, and midget dodgem cars.

Yet Coney Island, the “nickel empire,” is not the big borough’s only source of en­joyment. Brooklyn offers quieter and calmer ways to get more out of life. You prefer green and verdant thin Hop into a subway or bus or trolley car, and in less time than you can say “Leo, Durocher,” you find yourself outside the justly famous Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Go on in. It’s absolutely free, all fifty beautiful acres of it. Feast your eyes on the horticulture collections and plantings. Take your time viewing the Japanese landscape garden, probably the most celebrated in America. Cared for mainly by expert Japanese gardeners, these landscapes embody the religious and social traditions of Japan. But even if you cared nothing for the symbolism, you can’t help but be impressed by the sheer beauty of these gardens. Besides these Japanese “Niwa,” you’ll find other areas devoted to wildflowers, rock gardens, pools of graceful water lilies. The magnificent buildings spotted among the gardens contain still other collections, in addition to mountains of data on flora and fauna. This material is available to whomever wishes to peruse it.

A pebble’s heave from these gorgeous floral displays lies Prospect Park. Here, at your disposal, are 526 rolling lush acres of trees, green meadows and bluffs, con­taining picnic grounds, a zoo, a colorful lagoon, tennis courts and baseball dia­monds for the young and athletic, band­stands where summer evening concerts surfeit the music-lover, parade grounds, and wide gravel walks. Why, it puts New York’s spindly little Central Park to shame; just a mere collection of thorns and fagots! The site of Prospect Park is steeped in American history. North of the zoo is the Battle Pass, appropriately marked by a bronze plaque which in­forms the curious that General Sullivan made his stand against the British here in the Revolution’s Battle of Long Island. Stroll north to Lookout Hill and pause a moment before the monument commem­orating the bravery of the Maryland regi­ment which held the Hessians at bay in the same heroic battle. Wander south­ward along the East Drive, and you will bump into the Lefferts homestead, built in 1777 by Lieut. Peter Lefferts to re­place his home which was burned to the ground by the British. Mount the steps and go in to see how graciously the early Brooklyn settlers lived the rich paneling, the sturdy trundle beds, the hand-hewn timbers in the attic.

Read the rest here.

###

If you’re interested, here’s some some other reads from Holiday which I am reading or have saved to read for later:

1) “Nobody Knows More about Chili Than I Do”

2) “Opening 100 Clams” (the very first article to appear in Holiday)

3) “Living with a Peacock” by Flannery O’Connor.

Finally, there is this profile of Holiday in a recent issue of Vanity Fair.