The broad, broad view of the Washington Post sale

When I worked at Newsweek, when it was a part of the Washington Post family, Donald Graham used to appear in the office every few weeks. Everything you hear about the guy seemed to be true. He had to be pointed out to me — a gangly, awkward, fellow in a terrible suit. He seemed shy, and smiled the same way to everyone he passed in the halls, from our big cheese world-beating editor in chief to me, a nobody on the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder.

Part of my job was to sit in on the editorial meetings and report on them for our far-flung foreign affiliates. This meant standing in the back of the room, and quietly taking notes. Sometimes I'd perch on the window sill, overlooking Eighth Avenue and Columbus Circle. A few times, Mr. Graham ended up perched next to me, just watching, deflecting whatever remarks or questions were aimed at him.

And I remember looking at the guy, amazed that he ran a global, powerful media empire, and was the steward of one of the most important institutions in American journalism. There was so much resting on his metaphorical shoulders, I thought, as I wondered if that was dandruff I spotted resting on his actual shoulders. It was amazing that so many vital human endeavors ultimately came down to one actual person. And thank goodness that at that time and place the guy who signed my checks was decent and dedicated to the same mission that I was.

And now he sold it. Instead of that one man, who was really part of a family, he sold the thing to another man, Jeff Bezos. It wasn't to a private equity firm, or any of the many bottom-feeder newspaper chains still sulking about, which is good (they've long since sold off Newsweek, whose sordid afterlife as an increasingly unloved old nag was shaping up to be the big media story this month before the sale).

The Post sale, along with the Globe being snatched up by John Henry, raises a ton of questions that high-flying media folk like to publicly mull over. The emerging consensus, I think, is that these are pretty awesome developments. At last, fabulously wealthy, smart business leaders realize the value of "old media." Don't dwell too long on the depressing fact that they were able to buy major metropolitan and national institutions with as much thought and sacrifice as most of us buy new iPods, and what that says about what we value. These guys are new, and they "get it." The can negotiate change, and aren't used to failing. And becoming beholden to a person, a personality, is way way better than the fate most newspapers face, in which some market buys the papers on leverage and cuts them to death. The nagging voices chime up that these men represent such vast bundles of conflicts of interest, that the basic mission of fair and honest reporting is doomed. There's the essential plot development of uncertainty.

But I would like to take the long view. The media-land conversation is fascinating in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and among the dwindling corners of the industry where people still make a decent living. In other words, this is the one percent talking to itself. In the broader view, this is a snapshot of life in our present plutocracy, in which most of us can only look on and shrug.

I'm going to wander around a moment, but bear with me. In college I had a close friend who was full of ridiculous ideas that were pretty funny at the time, but I keep thinking about. Both of us were English majors, and very interested in topics like the future of poetry and the role of the arts in society. Sometimes this friend was eerily prescient: he said it would be a good idea to write about vampires, which were an enduring human theme and destined for a comeback (at that moment Stephenie Meyer was still only a receptionist who had never written a word). He thought hip-hop and opera were destined to meet someday (and perhaps it did, if you think R. Kelly counts. We can argue about whether that's a good thing). But one of his sillier idea was that the less profitable arts, like poetry, would have to revert to a model you saw in Renaissance Italy, of finding patronage from powerful families or institutions. The bizarre example he gave was that Bill Gates and Microsoft could be talked into needing a court poet. This spawned a million jokes about Pindaric odes to celebrate the arrival of Windows 95.

What my friend grasped far earlier than I did, was the cynical reality of how we live. I was too busy being earnest and judgmental to see that things don't really change much. I was alive to the idea that the story changes, but didn't realize that it usually happened in ways that I was able to anticipate. I remember in one of my poetry classes talking to a senior who had just accepted a job at a company in Seattle that sold books over the internet. I was sure that was the stupidest idea on earth — who'd deal with that when there was a Borders or a Barnes & Noble on every block? I was just about to start a summer internship at my hometown newspaper — a family run, essential service for my community that was as permanent as the mountains. That was how I'd build a stable and reasonable future. Joke's on me (that college friend I mentioned, by the way, is a investment banker now. He's doing alright).

For all the talk of change, things aren't changing, and to take a much, much broader view, there is great peril lining our future. Consider Venice, which for hundreds of years was a true merchant republic, governed by an evolving and surprisingly fluid class of wealthy businessmen, with the occasional nudge or shove from an angry mob. Unlike the rest of Europe, where wealth and power and social order was determined by land and conquest, Venice was about commercial skill, political dexterity, and luck.

It worked for a long time, until the 13th century when the ruling class decided to pull the ladder up behind them. They restricted access to the circles of power to families that already had it, who over time became a formal self-perpetuating, autocratic nobility. That came with all the nonsense that entails — inbreeding, the creation of surplus offspring that loiter about at parties and in convents and waste resources, and an ossified, entitled, unimaginative ruling class that props itself up until something new and vibrant knocks it over.

Venice slammed shut the door just over 500 years into its existence. Our American republican experiment just hit year 237.

By any other name... still a bad idea

Croatia has a vibrant and diverse wine culture. Among my favorites from Istria is teran, a kind of red-to-black, dry wine that from the right vineyard is sublime.

But Croatians have this insane quirk, which I think is specific to them, of serving wine mixed with Coke, over ice. This summer, I learned that this madness has a name, "Bambus" (they also serve wine with Fanta, which is a "Miš-Maš"). 

I'm just, shaking my head.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (2/2)

Rovinj, Croatia. Dawn, July 27.

I knew I was in for an interesting journey home from the start. I had bought the round-trip ferry ticket because it was cheaper, which meant I had to get to the dock very early — a lot of day-trippers get these tickets, so you have to present for boarding at 6 a.m. That makes for a sad night's sleep, but it's always rewarding to remind yourself what dawn looks like. That morning had a spectacular Mediterranean sunrise, with blues and pinks and golds like some Tiepolo absurdity.

I took a cab to the pier, and once there got into an argument with the driver. There was a dispute over the charge — 90 kunas (that's around $15) for a three minute ride, instead of the 60 kunas the meter read. This is apparently the official "shakedown tourists leaving town" rate, because it had been quoted to us the previous day when we called a different cab company. We had hung up on them.

There were a lot of people already milling about the good ship SS San Gwann, when a group of Venezia Lines officials appeared and set up a makeshift ticket counter. Then proceeded to inform us each that the boat was broken and couldn't sail, so we could take a refund or go on a chartered bus. The daytrippers left, but I figured I would get through it alright. But it wasn't easy. What would have been a three-hour trip turned into a six-hour one, thanks to traffic between Trieste and Venice. Even worse the air conditioner unit above me began leaking — not dripping really, leaking — on my head for the last hour of the trip. I made a makeshift tent out of the curtain and did my best to hide.

In Venice, I found my hotel very quickly — again without a map — and had a few days in the Serene Republic. I'll write more about that later. I continued on on Monday. There is a strange feeling the morning of a heavy day of travel, when you shower and put on your socks and realize the next time you are going to go through these motions it will be at your own home, on the other side of the planet, in about two days.

I had a few hours to kill before having to head to the airport, so I left my bags and hiked around the city. I stopped for lunch of cicchetti at a little place on Campo San Margherita, but I was so distracted by flipping through La Gazzetta dello Sport that I dropped a huge dollop of olive oil on my right knee. I thought despondently about how long I was going to have to look at that stain in the coming hours.

Marco Polo Airport is a remarkably undistinguished airport, not what you might expect from a place like Venice. Its best feature is the little food court on the north end of the departures area, which has a striking view over the lagoon toward the city, which looks remarkably large and close from there. I spent awhile there having a Peroni, watching a Carnival cruise ship maneuver away through the lagoon toward the sea like some kind of moving apartment block. Very strange.

I had to spend the night in Istanbul, which was a surprisingly easy. I wandered around a bit, hit the duty-free for some lokum, drank an Efes and watched things swirling around. I was in Istanbul for a few days a year ago, and I would have loved to get into the city for awhile. But it was the middle of the night, so I had to settle for the strange tableau of the globalized world you see at an international airport. In the dead of night in Istanbul there are a lot of flights to the former Soviet Union, to central Asia and the Gulf states. Lots of women in hijabs, tough-looking CIS dudes in track suits or polyester casualwear, guys that look they are going from one place to another and will never make it back. The thing about the people you observe in an airport is that you really can't match what they are going through the way you can in a place with the usual amount of gravity. You feel like you are in the background of what might be someone's very interesting movie.

Happily for my effort to not completely destroy my sleep schedule for a month, the airport is pretty spacious, and I didn't have trouble finding a pair of seats on which to stretch out. I'd brought along an eyeshade to block out the pervasive dull light, and was tired enough that I could tune out the occasional Turkish announcements over the PA system. Had to leave bright and early in the morning. Flying to America seems to now involve another layer of security theater, so we had to get our passports checked again at the gate, which was time-consuming and pointless. Then the long flight back.

Once again, the menace of getting the times to line up failed me. I had a few hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, and a big suitcase, so I decided to hang out in the arrivals hall because at least there was coffee and a place to sit. Good choice. Port Authority seems to have been somewhat cleaned up since the last time I really saw it — they seem to have gotten the homeless problem under control. But it is still a profoundly dispiriting place, with its dark tiles, an absence of sunlight, and a general sense of dropping a few scales down the socioeconomic ladder. I would like to get into the minds of those designers who made this place, and see what it was like the first day it opened. Did it seem like a bracing peek into a bold and efficient future, or was it always a grim warning of an impending dystopia of ugly buildings and social freefall? And did they deliberately create this disorientating sensation around the place, is it some kind of brutalist prank? How come it looks so enormous when you see it from the outside, yet the inside feels like a rat tunnel? Is it supposed to be a vision of some alternate reality, a place that should have never happened? A cautionary, counterfactual lesson about where America's postwar obsessions with automotives and fossil fuels would lead?

And what is most striking is how inefficiently it handles the basic task of providing information to ensure travelers get to the right place. How can a place that purportedly handles nearly a quarter million people a day not have any timetables or information boards anywhere? To find my gate I had to wait in line at the ticket window to ask, because nothing else at all seemed trustworthy.

Anyway, my hatred of long-distance bus travel is deep. It reminds me of those desperate, poor days in college when I would have to stand for hours to get home for Thanksgiving (pleased to see that no less a lover of travel and the open road than Jack Kerouac was on my side about bus travel).

And the fact that there is just no need for it. There are functioning railroad tracks running all the way from Manhattan to the old Williamstown train station three blocks from my house. That this is how generations of people travelled from here to there. Instead, I was stuck on a belching, rattling emissions-spewing contraption, winding around the old state roads of far western Connecticut and Massachusetts. There were three of us left on the bus by the time we reached town.

I wasn't done yet though! I still had to walk from the Williams Inn across the center of town to my house, dragging the suitcase bravely along behind me. I was at the end of my street, across from my driveway, when the right wheel finally gave up and popped out. And that was that.

So I've spent two blog posts complaining about the details of modern travel. But I haven't offered a word about what I did in between. I haven't written about watching my daughter learn to snorkel in the Adriatic, the pleasantness of having a glass of Favorit beer watching the sun set into the sea, the taste of a big plate of spaghetti al nero di seppia, standing beneath Titian's Assumption at the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, sitting on the ledge of a canal at an enoteca in Cannaregio, with a glass of wine, watching people walk by.

I try always to remind myself of some of my summers in high school. I worked mornings and evenings, and would sometimes spend afternoons sitting in the backyard. Usually I'd read, sometimes I'd read travel books about Italy and France that I'd taken from the public library. I'd sometimes see a speck of silver from an airliner impossibly high up, and wonder if I'd ever be on one.

So, yes, I'd happily do it over again.

The Berkshires to Istria, and back (1/2)

Terminal San Basilio

If you travel with any degree of awareness, you realize how inconceivable many of the things we take for granted would have been not a generation ago. You can buy a ticket to pretty much get anywhere you want on earth, at a shockingly low price if you think about it. Then you are zipped around in the stratosphere over oceans that once took weeks to cross, and think so little of it you fall asleep. 

For my grandparents, Venice was a place where rich people sometimes saw, but was nothing more than a thing in books, movies and legends. Istria was completely off the map, a neglected, poor, sickly forgotten part of the socialist bloc.

I say all this as a preamble because what follows will look a lot like complaining, and I don't want to leave the impression that I don't appreciate being able to get around. I sure do.

Yet there are trade-offs. This was the first year of the four that I've gone to Croatia that I went from the U.S. and not from Russia and Croatia (I wrote about last year's trip here). And now I realize how vanishingly rare it is to see another American when I'm there. Getting there and back was something of an odyssey, especially coming from Williamstown. The first leg was a five-hour bus ride on Peter Pan from the center of town to Port Authority, then a night in New York. I was trying to do things in an affordable manner, which meant that none of the times lined up neatly, meaning a lot of dead time.

This year, I ended up with tickets on Turkish Airlines, which had by far the cheapest fares over the Atlantic this summer. It was a pretty grim year for ticket prices to Europe, and it took weeks of searching to find the right price. I'd heard on travel websites that Turkish was luring more North American business, trying to turn Istanbul into a hub, so that explains our brief burst of luck.

I first left the country in 1999, and have done so quite a few times since, and each time seems to usher in a new era of discomfort and nuisance. On the plus side, Turkish Airlines leaves JFK earlier than most other European flights, so you avoid the late afternoon / evening crush that makes getting through security an ordeal. But the planes keep getting more and more absurd. I realized this time with alarm that the exact distance from the back of your seat to the one in front of you is the same as the distance from my tailbone to my knee. So, for anyone an inch taller than me, you're talking about physical impossibilities. As it is, this distance is too small for what we remember as a standard tray table — now you have these bisected mini-ones, which are perfectly useless if the guy in front of you has his seat back. The one thing that has gotten better are the new entertainment systems newer planes have rigged up for each individual seat. These are pretty cool, and if you are lucky create a kind of cocoon experience that can make a long trip bearable.

I landed in Istanbul, and had a few hours in Ataturk International Airport, where I had coffee and read Jan Morris' The Venetian Empire: A Sea Voyage once again. Then a short flight up to Venice. Air travel is so cognitively disruptive if you graft it into a historical context. In Venice's best days, its wealth and fame and riches relied heavily on managing the treacherous trade from one city to the other. The republic was the direct product and inheritor of Byzantium's Roman heritage, its overseas empire was born by conquering the city in the Fourth Crusade, and after the Turkish Conquest, this was the epicenter of all sorts of existential terror. That's a lot of history flowing back and forth over that distance from point to point, and in 2013 I jumped from one to the other almost as an afterthought, in a two and a half hour flight over the once-formidable Balkan interior.

The one part of this whole voyage that made me nervous was finding my way from the airport in Venice to the ferry terminal. I know that the great fun of Venice is allowing yourself to wander and get lost amid the campi and the ponti. But getting from Point A to Point B with a big suitcase and a time limit made me nervous. I studied the route on the map ahead of time, and made my way along with lots of self-doubt from Piazzale Roma down Fondamenta Cazziola to Fondamenta Cereri Dorsoduro to Fondamenta Rossa to Fondamenta Briati to Fondamenta San Sebastiano to San Basilio. And I made it with time to have a sandwich and check my email.

The ferry trip was a product of the necessity of timing. The usual way to get over to Istria would be to take the train to Trieste, then catch a bus down the coast. But my flight arrived so late that I would miss the connections, meaning that I'd have to spend a night. It was cheaper to spring for the ferry. I secretly really wanted to do this, because it sounds so romantic and proper — one really should arrive and leave Venice by the sea. The reality of the modern voyage was not so charming. The ship was more like an airliner than I thought. The windows were filthy, so you couldn't really see out, and the air conditioner was blasting far more than necessary. But it gives you a sense of the scale, that it is three hours of motoring over the open sea before you reach what was the heartland of the Venetian overseas empire.

My wife was waiting at the pier, with the owner of the flat we rented who had driven to give me a ride. That was very welcome.

Is all the world Istanbul now?

Already ready for anything. Taksim Square, August 2012

There are few places that grew on me as fast as Istanbul, where I spent a few days last August when I had to leave the EU to clear my visa. It is an overwhelming place — massive, crowded, sprawling over water and hills, and heavy with layer upon layer of history. But I didn't anticipate how it is one of the most authentically friendly places I've ever been. I remember with bemusement the almost constant conversations I had with men trying to sell rugs to me, the unhurried way the shopkeepers in the Bazaar would chat away while trying to make a sale, the way the waiters at restaurants fussed over me (even though it was Ramadan and a very busy time for them), the way Olga's friend from grad school took a day off work to show me around.

So I was horrified that it came to this. The people of Turkey do not deserve the kind of government that shoots tear gas and water cannons at them for a perfectly reasonable protest against a perfectly stupid and tacky transfer of a public asset into a playground for the wealthy. As everyone makes clear, the recent protests are not just about Gezi Park, but about an arbitrary and authoritarian government that takes advantage of the shortcomings of the democratic process. It is an example of something that has been happening all over the world. And the world is not big enough that you can afford to believe this isn't about us.

Erdogan is just another case of the only "Third Way" that really exists in politics today: the election of servants of self-perpetuating oligarchs who run the businesses, an international ruling elite that successfully manipulates the rickety power of voting with softcore nationalism and full-blown, religious mind-fog.

I think the template for this comes from Russia, obviously, where Vladimir Putin has successfully coopted the once unruly post-Soviet business elites to get on board, powered by the strange, desperate voting power of superstitious old crones in dying villages. Another obvious emulator of this strategy was the Fidesz party in Hungary, who took advantage of their first supermajority in Parliament to write one of the dumber constitutions of any self-proclaimed democracy.

Of course, the model is beginning to fall apart. Hungary's economy is abject mess, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban's schizophrenic switching between constituencies makes one question his mental health. In Russia, the state if relying more and more on the tried and true means of coercion, like insane new laws that proscribe jail terms for hurting the feelings of the religious faithful. And in time-honored Stalinist tradition, it not only throws the book at opponents like punk bands and bloggers, but has begun purging alternate centers of power within itself. So the idea that peaceful protests in Istanbul would end in baton-wielding policemen and water cannons is part of a general human story.

Here in America, we briefly flirted with the idea of looking at the problem with the Occupy movement, which ran out of steam too fast. Thanks to our institutional two-party system, we cling to an illusion of difference when in fact, both parties work for the same wealthy elites — only Democrats are slightly more concerned about how unsightly it would be to have old people dying in the streets. The process was well on its way even before 2001, when we terrorized ourselves into giving everything away. Obama hasn't really changed anything but the details — we still have secret prisons, we murder people by executive fiat more than we did before, and of course, the massive spying apparatus we've allowed to be put in place. And his fundamental faith in compromise is looking more and more like a part of some Bilderburg scheme to maintain the status quo at all costs. Obama represents the absolute poverty of "hope" as a political end or means. And if you think Cory Booker is the answer, keep hoping.

That's the world we live in, and the most depressing part is how few options there are. The conflict in Syria is fascinating because it is a struggle between the most dynamic and active alternatives to the "Third Way." Choosing between Authoritarianism and Jihad is hardly how anyone hoped the 21st century would play out.

I think about the people of Istanbul in Gezi Park, who are aware of what their government is about, who are part of the modern global economy and know its tools and ideals, and who are still faced with a daunting opponent. It would be a wonderful world, if we could choose being something other than the bug or the windshield.

Pictures from a drive down South

Last month, I had the chance to drive from Florida back up to Massachusetts. I've never really been to the South — still haven't, but at least now I've gone through it. Here are a few snapshots of what I saw.

I flew from Albany to Orlando, leaving on a grey rainy day. We flew high over the overcast skies, and there is a moment when you pop down and Florida appears. There's the blue ocean, the perfectly flat land, the geometric patterns humans have carved on it. You see in an eyeful that it is a different place.

The first leg of the trip was on Route 301 in north Florida, one of those great old highways that predate the interstates and have a roadside culture that is rapidly fading away. It is hard today to imagine why a road stand that specialized in oranges and orange-related goods would convince someone to stop, but once upon a time this meant something. 

A real fault lines of American culture today, expressed in the arrangement of SEC paraphernalia at a truck stop near St. Mary's, Georgia.

Had never heard of Huddle House before, but there is something delusional and bold about the slogan "Best Food Yet."

The buffet at Duke's Barbecue in Walterboro, SC. It may not look like much, but it's one of my favorite restaurants.

All you can eat pork and fried stuff, with buckets of sweet tea. This is what makes America great.

What else makes America great: Fireworks!

 Wildflowers in North Carolina.

When I lived in Washington, I didn't have a car and lived a fairly happy pedestrian life. Everyone I knew with a car complained about it constantly — especially if they lived in Northern Virginia. Here's just your ordinary midday traffic on the Beltway.

The Tropicana Field Experience

As a fan of an American League East team, Tropicana Field has figured in my imagination for years, though before the Joe Madden era it was mostly as just that dump where the Sox could pick up a few wins — though I also seem to remember that something about the place made Pedro Martinez mental. It is the architectural odd-man out in our division, which includes old classics like Fenway and Yankee Stadium (the old one, that is), as well as new places like Camden Yards, which completely changed the way we think about new baseball stadiums, and the Skydome (or whatever they call it now), which everyone thought was really cool for a few years when it was new (until said Camden Yards revolution happened). 

Last week, on a quick trip to Florida, I had a chance to catch the Sox down there, and seeing a game there was just as weird as I always imagined it would be.

The strangeness begins on the interstate, as you head into St. Petersburg from Tampa and the stadium appears before you, like some kind of giant, lopsided wart. It is near the highway, which is good I guess, but apparently everyone is convinced it is too far from most of the population of the Tampa Bay region, which is bad. Its neighborhood feels very lonely — in one of those marginal neighborhoods Sun Belt cities seem to have with undesirable and possibly empty office buildings, lots of parking lots, multi-lane boulevards, and no sign of human life outside of vehicles except the guys waving stadium traffic to the lots.

As is critical in that part of the country, there is lots of parking. And since the weather is always nice, there was some actual tailgating going on when we arrived. But even for a parking lot, it's pretty bland, save for the tall palm trees and the long mosaic on the pavement that leads through the lots to the stadium entrance from... nowhere. 

There is a main entrance rotunda, which bizarrely lets you into the outfield seats (and which, more bizarrely, the team claims was inspired by Ebbets Field). The inside tunnels are fairly spacious, with creatively packed with ways to spend money. But the walls are all painted cinder block, and there is something temporary about it all. It feels like one of those semi-permanent structures you find at fairgrounds. 

We sat in the 200-level, just beside press box on the third base side. Since it is a rare case of a baseball-only indoor stadium, it feels about the right size. And the sight lines for baseball were great. But it was very hard to put out of your mind how strange it is to be watching a game indoors when the weather outside is so nice. Sure, there are lots of showers and storms in the summer, but it is still hard to make peace with having a roof over your head for baseball. Or the massive air conditioning ducts lining the upper level. The Trop makes it worse by having such a strange roof, with its concentric circles of catwalks that have occasionally gotten in the way of the game. I have no idea how fielders play there, because just watching, I lost every fly ball that went up. 

I imagine it is a little easier for Rays fans live with the place now that the team has some history to build on. All over you see lots of photos from those encouraging recent years, but I fear that winning hasn't translated into any greater passion for the team. Attendance was very poor when I was there, and there was a very strong presence of Sox fans. By that, I mean close to half the obvious fans I saw were supporting the visitors. My section got very loud when Stephen Drew's grand slam blew the game open in the third inning. 

There's been a lot of chatter down there about getting a new ballpark, preferably somewhere more central in Tampa, with a retractable roof. But thanks to the fiasco of the Marlins new stadium down in Miami, the team probably can't count on much taxpayer help. I think the Trop will be around for awhile. And since tickets are affordable, the place is comfortable, and the team is decent, that isn't a disaster.

A new new media

Being cynical about professional media and the State of Journalism means I'm almost never impressed by the things that I love. I realized how bad it was a few weeks ago when I tried to put into words why I was so grumpy that my wife and begun a subscription to The New York Times. I realized that it was because I subconsciously want newspapers to die so the deadwood and barnacles stuck in the field would drift away to sell cars or whatever, while the people really interested in reporting and writing would have to start anew and get on with it. 

These days I still read a lot, and almost exclusively online. There are old media outlets I follow now on computer screens, like the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, which I've kept an eye on since college. There are a few new media outlets I check everyday — The Awl is a favorite, and Grantland is an experiment I'm curious about. But I realize that all of them are alike in that they don't fundamentally challenge the same categories we've always had. They are all, basically, conservative. Text is text, images are images, videos are videos, audio is audio, and the idea of hyperlinking has been around long enough to have become perfectly conventional. But everywhere, the same tried and true cubbyholes are respected, kept a safe, respectable distance apart.

But does it need to be that way, and should it remain that way? I sort of had my mind blown a little the other day when I clicked on a link at Pitchfork to a feature about the new London-based poseur-core indie band Savages ("No Heroes," by Laura Snapes). At this point I have no opinion on the band at all, I'm not in awe of the quality of the writing, and the overall vibe of brooding intensity reeking off the band is perhaps a bit overmuch. In the details, it feels more like marketing or promotion material… but why? The piece is visually interesting, the different elements are seamlessly connected, it is clear that writers, editors, photographers, and designers all worked together on it. And I realized that on the web you can do things like this, so after all this, why doesn't anybody?

I've been endlessly amused at the way old media tries to adopt bits of new media. It never worked out the details in a creative way. I don't see much value in forcing already overworked reporters to tweet photos and create slideshows for the website of images they have to take themselves. I don't mean the big boys, who give a little space and funding for videographers to present different kinds of stories. And I don't mean the occasional fancy infographic with clickable data points to graft next to an enterprise story. I mean, why doesn't anybody try to put it all together? Reading this profile of Savages, at some point I stopped paying attention to the band, and began thinking how awesome it would be if someone gave this treatment to municipal water rates.

Each January I teach a course at Williams on long-form magazine reporting and writing. One of the recurring themes that comes up is that it is very hard to do this kind of stuff anymore, certainly not in the great age of the postwar magazines, larded with ads for cigarettes and booze and read by upwardly mobile folks. I got to thinking that I wanted to try to think about something else, and last winter hatched the idea of bugging a good friend who is an outstanding computer scientist into co-teaching a course about marrying old and new media. I figured we could create one big project about something related to the college — about the breakdown of admissions applications, or the college's investment portfolio. Something that would blend old fashioned reporting and writing with all the graphic wonders out there that no one thinks are relevant. I wanted to do this for myself as much as anything else.

Maybe someday.

Margaret on the bier

I am enough of an anglophile that I've been following the public conversation in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death very closely. That is, I've been following the British conversation because the American one has been useless and shallow (credit to Alex Pareene, at Salon, for spelling it out real simple-like for the folks over here).

My first instinct was to keep quiet about it, mostly out of respect that if people had feelings that would inspire "Margaret on the Guillotine," then I wasn't fully engaged to have a right to speak up.

But when has that ever stopped anyone on the Internet, for heaven's sake.

One of the most interesting things I've read is this essay by comedian Russell Brand in this morning's Guardian. His disagreement with her is very kind and human, and allows him to see what really is the horror of her legacy:

All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.

A huge part of the revulsion against her is not so much what she did. Reading through the lefty papers it is clear that all but the most dogmatic Labourites have come around that much of what she did would have had to be done anyway (though, the success of economies like Germany and France that had no comparable Thatcher seems an important note).

What drove opponents nuts — and warmed the hearts of supporters — was the style, how mercilessly grim and angry her approach was. It wasn't enough to do these things, it was to create generations of mutual hate, creating a perfectly atomized little society — of which, she famously said, there was no such thing.

Here is where the comparisons to the American situation, and her obvious homologue, Ronald Reagan. Unlike Thatcher, who was a legitimate bully, I still against my best instincts have a hunch that Reagan was a legitimately decent human. This was the flashing genius of American conservatism, whose greatest successes in its modern form have been ruthlessly pragmatic criminals, like Nixon, or malleable half-wits, like Reagan and Bush Jr. Everything else is all rape philosophers and entitled phonies. For all the toxicity of our political system, a majority of us can't seem to bring ourselves — even in our worst moments — to elect unrepentant bullies to our highest office.

I want to think that this would be a good thing, except that the lesson has been absorbed a bit too well by my side. Thus, our alleged Democratic president has proposed an insane budget replete with "entitlement" cuts. This is an absolute failure of leadership, an f-you to the debt you owe the democratic process, as manifest in the very recent election won by a large margin.

A Day at the Museum; or, Nightmare Visions of a Neoliberal Dystopia

Know your betters!

I've been to a bunch of science museums in the past few years, and there a few things I've noticed they have in common, from the Museum of Science in Boston to the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw. The blocks of parked school buses outside, the huge school groups running around paying attention to seemingly everything but the museum, the well-meaning interactive exhibits. Usually these places get me thinking a lot about museum-craft, pedagogy, and the value of a practical education. But the American Museum of Natural History in New York was the only place where I also had to think about about life in the new Babylon at the heart of American neoliberal empire (yea, I'm always this fun).

I ought to admit that I'm a little wrong-footed at science museums. I can talk my way through a day at any art museum on earth with daughter, but a science museum requires a different skill set. They have a ruthless pedagogic drive that usually takes professional help to get the most out of. It doesn't matter how interesting, colorful, or interactive the exhibit on, say, the upper atmosphere of Neptune may be, because by the time you explain it your kid is likely to have already moved on to the next interesting, colorful, and interactive exhibit in view. But I do admire the way curators and designers consciously try to make sure the exhibits exist on several levels at once. You can enjoy checking out the fossilized dinosaur skeletons without meticulously following how the galleries are arranged like a cladogram to explain to you natural selection.

AMNH does a lot of things very well, but there are other things hanging around on inertia. The extensive animal habitat dioramas, for example, must be kept up solely for retro-chic reasons, for appearing on episodes of Mad Men and such. Because for teaching kids about wildlife, they're useless. I didn't see anyone paying them any attention whatsoever. If you want to teach a kid about impalas, you can show them a YouTube video, which would offer a richer experience without the uncomfortable questions about why the animals in front of you had to be killed. Same goes, roughly, for the ethnographic exhibits, which try hard, but look neglected and threadbare (though thankfully, no one is stuffed).

But the thing most on my mind, which grabbed my brain and wouldn't let go, is just how expensive the place is. I mean, really, really expensive. Like, your heart skips when you realize the general admission fee is serious, and your heart stops when you realize that doesn't include each separate special exhibition. That, like, prepackaged tuna salad on white bread sandwiches in the cafeteria cost $9.50.

I spent a lot of time trying decide whether this reflects or shapes our new economic reality. For the very wealthy — no shortage of them in Manhattan, and I saw many of their offspring with their nannies passing the day there — the cost is nothing to worry about. For middle class families, especially those from out of the area who can't be enticed to buy an annual membership — that is, me! — the cost is a sharp, stabbing pain that you try to reason away as a one-time, educationally valuable treat. For the less well off, presumably many of those kids from the outer boroughs who appeared on all those buses, it is something you do with your school one day, and you're so keyed up about not being in a school building and spring is in the air and your hormones are short-circuiting, you probably don't notice much. And for every other day of your life, the place is completely invisible and irrelevant.

I'm sure the museum would argue that the reason for such expense is because of all the awesome things they do. Sure they raise funds from rich people — all the time in fact! But it's never enough, and some of those costs have to be passed on. But they'd rather not talk about alternatives, because it would be awkward to raise the issue of whether or not making nice things like this publicly available to a wide number of people might just be the reason we pay taxes. That funding educational missions like this ought to be one of the fundamental things we have a government for. But, that's crazy liberal talk.

The worst part is that after having spent a heart-sinking amount of money, you are frequently reminded how much the experience "is made possible" by the incredible generosity and decency of folks like David H. Koch. For some mysterious reason, this plutocrat throws some cash to museums, though he throws much more into electing mouth-breathing ninnies to public office who think Adam and Eve ate those dinosaurs, and the bones might have been put in the earth because Jesus wanted to test our faith. Educating the unwashed doesn't motivate him as much as buying the kind of political power that ensures the existing power structure remains well in tact. That he remains obscenely wealthy, and no one asks dangerous questions about the allocation of our resources and what might be called out "common wealth."

The purpose of a museum of natural history may not be to question whether feudalism is a viable socio-political model for the 21st century, but if you think too hard, it teaches us a valuable lesson from natural history, that life is mean, selfish, and unfair.