BE HAPPY!

29 things to be happy about

Yes, it's all doom and gloom and war and global warming and Bush. Except when it's not

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist


Happiness knows no particular order, and neither does this list:
1) We may very well, within a year's time, have a black president. We may have a female president. We may, unfortunately, also have a bizarre robotic nutball Mormon president. No matter how it turns out, it will be very strange and unnerving and different and a bit startling and therefore at least remotely interesting to watch. Which, you have to admit, is far better than how it's been for the past seven years, which is utterly humiliating, repellant, cancerous.
2) Here is this ingenious new alarm clock. It has an Internet connection that hooks directly into your bank account. If you oversleep, it begins to withdraw funds from your account. And donate them. To groups you really, really despise. Ten minute oversnooze? Fifty bucks goes to the GOP. Oversleep a half an hour? There goes $100 to the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, the Bush Presidential Library (for all the crayons). Sleep till noon? Five hundred bucks to the Aryan Nation or National Right to Life or the Lindsay Lohan Cocaine Fund. Because nothing is more motivating than abject hate. Except, of course, abject love. But that's a completely different gizmo.
3) You're not imagining it. Your intuition was completely correct. Tom Cruise really is insane. Also, it is a safe bet that Tom and Jerry O'Connell will not be working together anytime soon.
4) Women and minorities appear to be galvanized by Hillary Clinton's presidential run. Youth and college-educated voters appear to be galvanized by Barack Obama's. No one at all is truly, deeply galvanized by Mitt Romney or John McCain or crazy little Mike Huckabee, and everyone is generally repulsed by the fetid little tyrant that is Rudy Giuliani. All of this, remarkably, seems just about exactly as it should be.
5) There is apparently a fairly good argument to be made as to why Google — a 10-year-old company worth $100 gabillion that's run by a pair of geeky 35-year-olds who still, to this day, in just about every photo, look like they can't believe this is all really happening to them — should buy the New York Times. Which seems, at first glance, totally insane. Then it quickly begins to make perfect sense.
Then you're like, wait a sec, you know what? Screw the Gray Lady; Google should buy General Motors, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft and Dow and Viacom and pretty much all of North Korea and just wipe them all away and replace them with nice organic flowerpots and solar farms and really big trampolines. How much better! (Note to Google: Forget the NYT. Please buy The San Francisco Chronicle. Way cheaper. Plus, we're local. I would very much like to eat free sushi in your amazing cafeteria every day. Thank you.)
6) Gentle Giants rescue.
7) "I Don't Want to Blow You Up!" is a new children's book by the author of "It's Just a Plant." It dares to tell children that the vast majority of scarf/turban/headband/burqa-wearing peoples in the world do not, in fact, wish to bomb them, eviscerate them, eat their brains with a rhino horn or hang them upside down and steal their Playstation 3 and rape their dog. Despite what Bill O'Reilly's children's book says.
8) Britain has officially dropped the "War on Terror" label, given how, well, it's not really a war, given how most terrorists are not exactly highly organized armies of well-trained soldiers and are, instead, mostly scattershot clusters of insane fanatical murderers and suicidal religious mutants, and should be treated that way. The war on Christmas, now that's a real war.
9) TheAtlantic.com is now free. No more paid subscriptions to gain access to its excellent archives and full-length pieces. Upside: You can now read David Foster Wallace's brilliant 2005 piece on right-wing radio. Downside: the giant, throbbing mixed blessing that is Andrew Sullivan's blog.
10) Dolphins love sex. Frequent, kinky, aggressive, even violent. Homosexual, bisexual, incestuous, you name it. Sometimes with other species. Sometimes gang-rape style. Sometimes in frothy orgies. Sometimes (sort of) with humans. Yes, dolphins.
11) This just in: The cosmos is actually filled with supermassive black holes. It is also packed with dark energy, a very strange and mysterious material that appears to be pushing out the edges of the universe at a faster and faster rate and no one knows why, or what the hell dark energy actually is or how it works and it might all merely point to the overwhelming fact that the universe is, in truth, a giant, random, unpredictable mindf- of a place that's not even really a place at all, but more of a concept, a theory, a wicked delicious shaman's peyote dream and consequently its mysteries can never be "solved" and its cosmic messages never fully decoded and therefore you get to sit back right now and take a deep breath and exhale very slowly, and smile, safe in the knowledge that we actually know very, very little about anything, and we always will.
12) You can now study, in academic circles, the glory that is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
13) The pollutive factories, the mountains of plastic, the enormous carbon footprint, the illusion of better taste, the myth of health. Yes, people seem to be waking up to the giant $15 billion sham that is the bottled water industry. Fact: The EPA's regulations for tap water are actually more stringent than the FDA's rules for bottled water. Solution: Filter your own tap water, get a Sigg. Easy.
14) Dude, like, did your dad just post a message on your Facebook wall? Is that your mom texting you from her iPhone? Yo, brah, is that your grandma doin' the jitterbug on her own MySpace page? Dude, WTF are all these old people doing all over the Web 2.0?
15) RU-486, that very safe, woman-empowering drug from France that induces a very early stage abortion, is proving to be a quiet, revolutionary, highly personal and yet very effective giant middle finger to the misogynistic Christian right, much of Congress and about half the Supreme Court.
16) Hormone-free, grass-fed beef really does taste better. Organic food really is healthier. Tell everyone you know.
17) Absinthe.
18) Whiskipedia.
19) Drawn!
20) Gary Vaynerchuk.
21) The disappearing car door.
22) Arts & Letters Daily.
23) Cate Blanchett.
24) Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."
25) Abstinence education is, of course, a dismal failure.
26) Karl Rove is gone. Trent Lott is gone. Rick Santorum is gone. Richard Pombo is gone. Sweet Jesus, a whole rancid stew of hardcore Bushites has vanished like rat-tailed thugs from a murder scene, leaving behind all manner of shrapnel and smoking craters and karmic wreckage for the next wave of politicos to try and clean up. But hey, at least they're gone. Mostly.
27) Gay couples are just as committed in their relationships as anyone else, and are often more satisifed. I know, big shock. Will these two new studies matter a whit to the right-wing homophobes who ignore all such studies, including those that have proven, say, that the adopted kids of gay couples turn out just fine, or that married gays don't actually cause riots, floods, or Ebola virus outbreaks? Of course not. No matter. Still good fuel for the fight.
28) A whopping 84 percent of Americans claim to be somewhere between "pretty happy" and "very happy." No, no one knows what sort of crack they're smoking. I mean, haven't they all seen the global warming? The imminent apocalypse? The staph infections and the drug-resistant bacteria and the Islamo-fascists and Dick Cheney's black and vile stare? Why all the happiness? It is because of all the Prozac? Or is it because of No. 29?
29) 1.20.09.

Not so Bad -- America

Anyone who reads the serious press about the condition of the US might be excused for believing that the country is headed towards a series of deep crises. This impression is exacerbated by economic slowdown and by the presidential primaries, in which candidates announce bold plans to rescue the country from disaster. But even in more normal times there are three ubiquitous myths about America that make the country seem weaker and more chaotic than it really is. The first myth, which is mainly a conservative one, is that racial and ethnic rivalries are tearing America apart. The second myth, which is mainly a liberal one, is that America will soon be overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists. The third myth, an economic one beloved of centrists, is that the retirement of the baby boomers will bankrupt the country because of runaway social security entitlement costs. America does, of course, have many problems, such as spiralling healthcare costs and a decline in social mobility. Yet the truth is that apart from the temporary frictions caused by current immigration from Latin America, the US is more integrated than ever. Racial and cultural diversity is in long-term decline, as a result of the success of the melting pot in merging groups through assimilation and intermarriage—and many of the country's infamous social pathologies, from violent crime to teenage drug use, are also seeing improvements. Americans are far more religious than Europeans, but the "religious right" is concentrated among white southern Protestants. And there is no genuine long-term entitlement problem in the US. The US suffers from healthcare cost inflation, a problem that will be solved one way or another in the near future, long before it cripples the economy as a whole. And the long-term costs of social security, America's public pension programme, could be met by moderate benefit cuts or a moderate growth in the US government share of GDP. With a linguistically united, increasingly racially mixed supermajority and a solvent system of middle-class entitlements, the US will remain first among equals for generations to come, even in a multipolar world with several great powers.Let's begin with the alleged "balkanisation" of America by race and ethnicity. Almost everything that is written about this subject is misleading, not least official US government reports. For example, a 2004 press release by the US census bureau, based on analysis of data from the 2000 census, had this sensationalist title: "Census Bureau Projects Tripling of Hispanic and Asian Populations in 50 Years; Non-Hispanic Whites May Drop to Half of Total Population." Headlines like this have inspired leftists to declare that multiculturalism is inevitable in a post-white America, led nativists and racists to lament the supposed untergang of white America under a demographic avalanche from the third world, and caused Europeans to wonder whether in an America with a non-white majority, the focus of foreign policy will shift to Mexico and Central America, or Africa or Asia.There's just one problem: there isn't going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either. The "coming non-white majority" myth is based on a misuse of the arbitrary racial classification system adopted in the 1970s, which assigns all Americans to the categories of white, black, Asian, native American or "Hispanic." According to the government, "Hispanics" may be of any race as long as they are of Latin American ancestry. So, a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian-American whose grandparents showed up from Germany in Argentina mysteriously in 1946 is a "Hispanic" while an Arab-American Muslim is a "non-Hispanic white." The myth of the non-white majority is based on treating "Hispanic" as the name of a race. Adding all Hispanics to all blacks and Asians makes it possible to claim that California and Texas already have "non-white" majorities, and that the US as a whole will follow in the second half of this century. But if you don't treat Hispanics as members of a single race, then the picture looks quite different. According to the census bureau, the US population in 2050 will look like this: non-Hispanic white, 50.1 per cent; Hispanic, 24.4 per cent; Asian, 8 per cent; black, 14.6 per cent, with a small residuum in other categories. The non-Hispanic white share of the population will drop from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to a bare majority in 2050. But what if instead of bracketing all Hispanics together (white and non-white), we bracket all whites together (non-Hispanic and Hispanic)? In the 2000 census, 48 per cent of Hispanics identified themselves as "white," 2 per cent as black, 6 per cent as belonging to two or more races and 43 per cent as members of "some other race." Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the pattern of Hispanic self-identification by race is the same in 2050. If 48 per cent of the Hispanic population in 2050 calls itself "white" and that group is added to the non-Hispanic white category, then the combined non-Hispanic white and Hispanic white group in 2050 would be 61.8 per cent. So, instead of the decline in the non-Hispanic white population from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to 50.1 per cent in 2050, there would be a more moderate reduction in the white majority from 74.5 per cent in 2000 to 61.8 per cent in 2050.Even this understates the proportion of the "white" population in 2050, because it ignores intermarriage. While fewer than 10 per cent of foreign-born Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, by the third generation the out-marriage rate is half. If the children of Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites are treated as white, then the white majority in 2050 will be even larger. Then there is intermarriage among whites with Asians and blacks. Black intermarriage rates, though rising, are low—around 15 per cent. Already about half of Asian-Americans (migrants from India, China and elsewhere) marry outside of their official "race," mostly to non-Hispanic whites, and whatever the government calls them, their children tend to be seen as generic whites. So let's take half of the Asian population in 2050 and add it to the white population. This increases the white majority to 65.8 per cent in 2050. Here, then, is the real story: the white American population will decline from 75 per cent to about 66 per cent between 2000 and 2050. Big deal.Nor is there any long-term danger of the US becoming permanently polarised between anglophones and Spanish speakers. Among second-generation Hispanics, roughly half speak no Spanish at all, while fewer than 10 per cent speak only Spanish. By the third and fourth generations, Hispanics in the US are almost completely anglophone. In their rate of linguistic assimilation, they resemble the European immigrants of earlier generations. The claim that in a globalised, wired world the incentives for linguistic assimilation are weakened appears to be false, at least in the case of American Hispanics. And they are the only group that count, in this respect, because all other linguistic minorities in the US are negligible, as a percentage of the total population. If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry. So the US is not going to fall apart along ethnic lines, like Yugoslavia or Iraq. Will it be taken over by religious fundamentalists? Many observers abroad have the impression that Americans are growing more religious, while Europeans are growing more secular. This simply isn't true. Americans are far more religious than western Europeans, but in the US, no less than in Europe, the long-term trend is towards greater secularism.In a 2001 study of religious attitudes among Americans, researchers at the City University of New York discovered that the number of Americans who profess no religion had grown from 8.16 per cent in 1990 to 14.17 per cent in 2000. Americans with no religion at all are now the third largest belief group in the US after Catholics and Baptists, and their number, around 30m, is almost as great as that of Baptists, who number around 34m. Moreover, the number of Americans who, even if they believe in God, do not belong to any religious organisation went from 46 per cent in 1990 to a 54 per cent majority by 2000, according to the study.When the subject is actual church attendance rather than vague spiritual belief, the gap between the US and Europe shrinks further. According to the Gallup millennium survey of religious views, the number of North Americans (the US plus Canada) who attend church at least once a week is 47 per cent, compared with the west European average of 20 per cent. And some scholars say that the number is inflated, because many Americans are embarrassed to tell pollsters how rarely they attend church.According to the Gallup poll, the number of North Americans who believe that the Bible is "the actual word of God" has fallen from 65 per cent in 1963 to just 27 per cent in 2001. At the same time, attitudes among Americans toward homosexuality, sex out of marriage and censorship are growing steadily more liberal. Abortion is the major exception; younger Americans tend to be more opposed to abortion than their elders. Possibly this reflects the growing use of ultrasound by parents to view their offspring in the womb, a practice which may be inadvertently undermining the distinction that supporters of liberal abortion laws have tried to make between foetuses and babies. If the American people are getting less religious, then why is "God talk" growing in public life? But the truth is that it isn't growing; it's always been part of public life. Liberal presidents of the 20th century like Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson referred to God and the Bible and Christ more often than most of today's conservative politicians. During the second world war, Franklin D Roosevelt tended to use the phrases "western civilisation" and "Christian civilisation" interchangeably. At the 1941 Atlantic summit in Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill joined the British and American sailors in singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "O God Our Help in Ages Past" and "Eternal Father Strong to Save." Bush and Blair may have prayed together but they never would have sung hymns together in public.The trend towards European-style secularism is most advanced among the "blue states" of the coasts. The American south is much more conservative. But even the south is far more secular and liberal than it was a generation or two ago. Religious southern politicians simply sound like the midwestern and northeastern politicians of previous times. In fact, the "religious right" is almost entirely a phenomenon of white southern Protestants. It is as much an ethnic and regional movement as a religious movement. Before the civil rights movement, white southern Christians identified themselves as… well, white southern Christians. But after the civil rights era, talk about "whites" or "white southerners" sounded too much like the rhetoric of racists, so white southern conservatives emphasised the Christian part of their identity (hadn't Martin Luther King been a Christian minister?). White southerners never pursued another option, defining themselves in secular ethnic terms as "Scots-Irish" or "Anglo-Celtic," because as members of the majority in the south, and as descendants of pre-1776 settlers, they think of themselves simply as "Americans" or "southerners" rather than members of an immigrant group like Italian-Americans or Greek-Americans. In the same way, in Britain the majority English tend to think that the Scots, Irish and Welsh are "ethnic" while they are not. In short, the language of religion in the US, as in the Balkans and Iraq, has less to do with theology than with ethnocultural politics. Religious right conservatism is the ethnic identity politics of Scots-Irish and Anglo-American southerners in the former confederacy.White southern populists and black Americans, a majority of whom still live in the south, have one thing in common. Because the now moribund southern planter aristocracy dominated secular political, commercial and educational institutions, the community leaders of blacks and poor whites alike tended to be Protestant pastors like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson—and Jerry Falwell and Mike Huckabee. And for outsiders to assume that American fundamentalists are mere pawns of the capitalist elite is a mistake. According to polls, the only group as hostile to big business and big banks as the radical left are members of the religious right. When Mike Huckabee, the presidential candidate from Arkansas and former Baptist minister, thunders against Wall Street, he is as serious as William Jennings Bryan was a century ago. (The white and black strains of southern religious populism were briefly united in the 1990s, when the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson teamed up to protest against the conditions of mostly white coal miners in Appalachia.) The US, then, is no more likely to become a Protestant version of theocratic Iran than it is to become a Yugoslavia. Yet the conventional wisdom says America is still in danger of bankruptcy and economic collapse as a result of the looming costs of government entitlements for the retiring baby boom generation. But when alarmists talk about the "entitlements crisis" in the US, they conflate two programmes—social security (the public pension system) and Medicare (the public health insurance system). The growth of social security, as a share of GDP, will be modest until the end of this century, and any shortfalls can be dealt with by minor adjustments in how it is paid for. There is a bigger problem with Medicare, whose costs, if they continue to grow as at present, will eat up an additional 10 per cent or more of GDP by the mid-century. But Medicare's budgetary problem is a reflection of the healthcare cost inflation that is affecting the entire US economy, private and public alike. The bad news is that there is no consensus about the cures for healthcare cost inflation, much less its causes. It is much easier to ignore the spreading cancer of healthcare costs while focusing on the toothache of long-term social security funding. To date the healthcare plans of many Democrats and Republicans alike have focused more on the spread of coverage than on the harder challenge of cost containment. But we can be sure eventually that the US will face and deal with healthcare cost inflation, perhaps by unpleasant methods, like rationing by government, employers or insurers. In comparison with the problem of healthcare cost inflation, the alleged crisis of social security is puny. Claims of a "crisis" revolve around two dates: 2017, when the social security surplus runs out and the programme becomes a pure pay-as-you-go system based on annual payroll taxation; and 2041, when payroll tax revenues fall short of expenditures. Even in 2041, social security will be able to pay most of its obligations. The crisis, then, is nothing more than the fact that taxes will have to be raised or benefits cut before 2041 in order to supplement a mostly sound system. (Great confusion is spread by the phrase "unfunded liabilities." The only programmes with "unfunded liabilities" are those, like social security, paid for by dedicated taxes, in this case a payroll tax. This permits calculations of future divergences between dedicated tax revenues and expenditures. The Pentagon budget is paid from general tax, so the concept is inapplicable.) The use of dates like 2017 and 2041, moreover, gives a specious precision to claims that in fact are extremely dubious. This is underlined by the fact that the US government regularly revises the date of the alleged social security apocalypse, as it reconsiders its assumptions. The "intermediate" calculations on which current estimates are based are almost certainly unrealistic. They assume a low rate of productivity growth in the US over the next half century of 1.7 per cent. This is only slightly higher than the average of 1.5 per cent in the long period of low productivity growth from 1973 to 1995. But from 1996 to 2006, US productivity growth boomed at an annual rate of between 2 and 3 per cent in most years. Productivity growth slowed after 2004, but surged ahead in the last quarter at 6.3 per cent. Nobody knows whether the resumption of high productivity growth in the last decade was a blip or the beginning of a new pattern. The point is that if US productivity grows at a rate near the historic average of 1945-2008, the picture for the solvency of social security is much brighter. (This is not the place for a full discussion of economic prospects, but it is worth noting that US industrial output rose nearly 35 per cent in the past ten years, faster than any other G7 country.)Moreover, what the doomsayers neglect to tell the public is that if the cap on the amount of income subject to payroll taxation were lifted, the result would be such a flood of money from high earners that the problems of social security would be solved forever. And even if payroll taxes were raised on all workers, as a result of productivity growth the average earner in 2050 may well have wages that in real terms are at least 60 per cent higher than today's. As a share of my income, I pay far higher taxes than my great-grandfather, but I am much better off because less of a lot is greater than more of a little.It is possible, and in my opinion likely, that in the future congress will choose to infuse general revenues into the social security system, as an alternative to raising payroll taxes on all workers. If that is the case, then the only question is whether social security is affordable. The answer is clearly yes. The share of government at all levels as a percentage of GDP is lower than that in almost all other industrial democracies. In the US, government expenditure at all levels—federal, state and local—as a share of GDP hovers just above 30 per cent (despite spending a staggering $626bn on military-related costs in 2007, over 22 per cent of the federal budget). By comparison, the EU-25 average was 47 per cent in 2005. An additional 2 per cent of GDP can be added to social security over the next half century without altering America's position as one of the least statist economies in the world. Indeed, the baby boom generation caused an increase in US government expenditures once before—when they were children. In the 25 years from 1950 to 1975, expenditures on public education (in the US, a local and state responsibility) rose from 2.5 per cent to 5.3 per cent. What counts is not the ratio of workers to retirees—which will have gone from 18 to 1 in 1950 to slightly more than 2 to 1 in 2050—but the dependent-to-worker ratio, with dependents defined as children under 20 and retirees over 65. The dependent to worker ratio will be less in 2050—80 to 100—than it was in the 1960s, when there were 90 dependents to 100 workers because fewer women worked and there was a large cohort of baby boomer children. What's more, American workers in 2050 will be far more productive than they were in the 1950s. Barring catastrophes, the US in 2050 will be much more racially integrated; will remain culturally and linguistically quite homogeneous; and will be much richer, easily able to afford to pay for social security and decent healthcare. And partly as a result of this unity and prosperity, the US will continue to be a major power, though not a solitary hegemon.The rise of China, India and other Asian powers is indeed shifting the balance of global wealth and power. On this point the conventional wisdom is correct. But the relative rise of Asia will come at the expense of Europe, whose share of global GDP will decline, chiefly because its population will be stable or shrinking. Not that relative proportions are all that important. The Europeans of 2050 will still be much richer than the Chinese and Indians in per capita income, and, thanks to productivity growth, much richer than the Europeans of today too. According to Goldman Sachs, the Nafta (the US plus Mexico and Canada) share of global GDP in 2050 will be 23 per cent. This is close to the US shares of global GDP in 1960 (26 per cent) and 1980 (22 per cent). And per capita income in the US will be far higher than that in China and India into the 22nd century, if not beyond. Why is there such a gap between the conventional wisdom about America's future and the actual trends? Part of the answer involves the bias toward sensationalism that afflicts all commercial media. Another factor is the distortion of the facts by special interests. For example, the myth of the social security crisis has been spread by, among others, people in the securities industry who would like to see this successful public pension programme privatised. The US is facing major challenges—but they are not the ones usually identified. Long-term racial and linguistic balkanisation may not be a problem, but class lines in the US are hardening; there is now less social mobility in the US than in Europe. The US is not in danger of becoming a theocracy, but it is in danger of becoming a plutocracy. Social security does not threaten to bankrupt America, but healthcare cost inflation does. The US is not going to be eclipsed any time soon by another superpower, but it may exhaust itself by allowing its commitments to exceed the resources that the public is willing to allot to foreign policy. The sooner the mythical problems can be dismissed, the sooner the genuine challenges to America's future can be identified and addressed.

Shanghai/Delft

Timothy Brook is a distinguished professor of Chinese, holding appointments at both Oxford University and St. John's College at the University of British Columbia. He's written a dozen scholarly volumes about Asian social and economic history, including The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China and Culture and Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia. There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why such a formidable Sinologist should be bringing out a book with a 17th-century Dutch painting on the cover and the title Vermeer's Hat.
But the explanation turns out to be quite simple: This book isn't about Vermeer's brushstrokes or the use of light in his paintings. Instead, it really does focus on the fur hats -- and the old maps and the dishes of fruit and the silver coins -- pictured in those paintings. As his subtitle suggests, Brook hopes to use these pictorial elements to describe "the dawn of the global world," in particular the economic entanglements between the Netherlands and China.
Vermeer's Hat thus aims "to capture a sense of the larger whole of which both Shanghai and Delft were parts: a world in which people were weaving a web of connections and exchanges as never before." To do this, Brook looks at seven works of art -- not all of them by Vermeer -- "for the hints of broader historical forces that lurk in their details." For instance, in the chapter titled "School for Smoking," he notices that 17th-century Dutch porcelain, representing Chinese scenes, often shows people smoking. Where did the painter get the idea that the Chinese smoked? This leads to an overview of tobacco commerce and consumption in Asia, building on accounts of the shipping routes, the trade laws and the movement of silver, as well as tobacco, to the East. But Brook also takes time to discuss the social impact of chi yan or "eating smoke."

God

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."
Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone.
The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of the divine. Spinoza, too, posited that God's activities in the universe were simply a description of mathematical and physical laws. For that and other heretical views, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community.
German mathematician Georg Cantor's work on infinity and numbers beyond infinity (the mystical "transfinite") was denounced by theologians who saw it as a challenge to God's infiniteness. Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.
For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan, an uneducated clerk from Madras who wowed early 20th-century Cambridge, an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Though an agnostic, the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.
And famously, Albert Einstein said God "does not play dice" with the universe.
What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.
Witness, for example, such transcendent numbers as phi (not to be confused with pi), often called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio. At 1.618, it describes the spirals of seashells, pine cones and symmetries found throughout nature. Other mysterious constants like alpha (one-137th) and gamma (0.5772...) pop up in enough odd places to suggest to some that they are an expression of the underlying beauty of mathematics, and to others that someone or something planned it that way.
But does that translate into actual belief?
The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).
Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).
This newest addition to the neo-atheist field crowded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others emboldened by the recent transformation of non-belief from a 97-pound weakling into a he-man, Paulos thankfully employs little math, preferring to see things, as he tells us, in the stark light of "logic and probability."
Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.
The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.
Lord knows Paulos isn't the first mathematician to proclaim his lack of religious faith. Cambridge's famous wunderkind G.H. Hardy loudly and proudly adjudged God to be his enemy. To Erdos, God, if He existed, was "the supreme fascist."
Even as Paulos works to refute the classical arguments for God's existence, he does something too few of his mindset do: Chide non-believers for unsportsmanlike conduct.
"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."
That doesn't prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is "logical abracadabra.'' The design, or teleological argument, is a "creationist Ponzi scheme'' that "quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.''
Much of theology is "a kind of verbal magic show.'' A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.
However, math, specifically something called Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions under which order must appear, can account for the illusion of divine order arising from chaos.
Paulos provides a nice counterpoint to theoretical physicist Stephen Unwin's 2003 book The Probability of God, which calculated the likelihood of God's existence at 67 per cent, and to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's use of a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem to put the odds of Christ's resurrection at 97 per cent.
Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"
Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.
To Paulos, the tale is a great example of "how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence."
His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."
The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."
As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."
Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.

More Burns

"Tonight, in Scottish households across the land, glasses will be raised and haggis addressed in honour of Robert Burns, feted poet and national hero. Since his death in deepest poverty in 1796 at the age of 37, the man has become a sentimental legend, his life, as novelist Andrew O'Hagan points out, 'unfolding more like an opera than a film'."

Happiness

In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about happiness, including who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between. Eric Weiner -- a peripatetic journalist and self-proclaimed grump -- wanted to know why. So with science as his compass, he spent a year visiting the world's most and least happy places, and the result is a charming, funny and illuminating travelogue called The Geography of Bliss.
From the Persian Gulf to the Arctic Circle, Weiner discovers that happiness blooms where we least expect it. Who knew that the long, dark Icelandic winter gives rise to a magical, communal culture that has done away with envy and sobriety? Or that the Thais so prize "fun" that their government has created a Gross Domestic Happiness Index to ensure they get enough of it? Or that Moldovans are miserable because they "derive more pleasure from their neighbor's failure than their own success"? Or that the wealthy citizens of Qatar lead pampered, joyless lives in a "gilded sandbox" while the poor citizens of Bhutan are cheerfully obsessed with archery tournaments, penis statues and feeding marijuana to their fat (and presumably happy) pigs?
But Weiner does more than report on the lifestyles of the delighted and despondent. He participates -- meditating in Bangalore, visiting strip clubs in Bangkok and drinking himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. These cultural forays are entertaining, but the real focus of his story is on the people he meets in cafés and on buses, the people who rent him rooms and give him directions, the people whose conversations, confessions and silences reveal the deep truths about their lands and lives.
Weiner asks an Icelander whether he believes in elves, and the man replies, "I don't know if I believe in them, but other people do and my life is richer for it," leading Weiner to conclude that Icelanders "occupy the space that exists between not believing and not not believing. It is valuable real estate." He meets a widower in Slough -- a small town outside London with little to recommend it -- who explains that he's thought about moving away but that in the end "you come home because this is where you live." Weiner realizes that when our relationships end, "the place is all that remains, and to leave would feel like a betrayal....He doesn't love Slough, but he loved his wife, loved her here, in this much-maligned Berkshire town, so here he stays." Memory, like bliss, seems to have its own address.
Weiner has studied the scientific literature on happiness, too, and weaves it into his narrative, which he leavens with a steady stream of clever quips. We learn that "Bhutan has made tremendous strides in the kind of metrics that people who use words like metrics get excited about" and that "hairpin turns, precipitous drop-offs (no guardrails), and a driver who firmly believes in reincarnation make for a nerve-racking experience."

Burns Day

It's the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). He's the man who wrote the lines: "Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose, / That's newly sprung in June; / Oh, my luve's like the melodie / That's sweetly played in tune."
He only published one book in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), but many of the poems were set to music and are still sung today in Scotland and around the world. A few years after his death, friends began to gather on his birthday to celebrate his life, and the event slowly grew in size and became a Scottish tradition. This day is now a Scottish national holiday.

It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say “I told you so” after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century — always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.
In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a “borderless” world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a “clash of civilizations.” Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.
Huntington’s cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was “The West and the Rest”: the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”
Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history’s compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; “indigenization” had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.
Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no “universal civilization,” Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called “Davos culture,” consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.
In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.
It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations — Western Europe being one example, Russia another — and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.
Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington’s thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. “The things and ways that the West took to ‘the rest,’” I wrote, “have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.” I had questioned Huntington’s suggestion that civilizations could be found “whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.” Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.
Huntington had written that the Turks — rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels — would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. “What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?” Huntington asked. “At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”
Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.
“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)
I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.
More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

The Wire

The Wire Final Season

Week 3: Who doesn't like a blind bartender?By Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and John SwansburgUpdated Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 4:52 PM ET
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: I'm WorriedPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 11:01 AM ET
Dear David,
Yes, I remember the time I had an awesome college girlfriend and I hadn't seen her all summer and it was finally the first day back on campus. I remember that time very well, because she had decided, over the summer, to start wearing black nail polish, stop shaving her armpits, and go to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas pick coffee beans or some shit like that. Luckily, I didn't like her anyway.
The way I felt when I made these unhappy discoveries is a little bit the way I felt after watching the first episode of the final season of The Wire last night. I was enjoying myself just fine for the first 20 minutes or so, becoming reacquainted with some of my favorite drug dealers—the intensely lovable psycho-killer Snoop most of all—and scandalous cops. But then we entered the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, and it was straight-up whiskey-tango-foxtrot time for me. I thought the show stopped dead, just about the time we were introduced to the saintly city editor and the darkly ambitious white-boy reporter. But let me not get ahead of myself here. We are told that the collapse of big-city journalism is the show's theme this season, so the two of us will have plenty of time to discuss the thing that interests all reporters more than anything else—namely, us.
First, let me dissent from Mr. Weisberg's audacious claim that The Wire is the best show on television ever. I think that I would have agreed with his assertion, except that I recently watched, in seriatum, the first season of The Sopranos, which is just pure Shakespeare. Actually, it's better than Shakespeare, because Paulie Walnuts isn't in Shakespeare.
It has become a cliché to call The Wire Dickensian, because it so clearly is, but it's no insult to Dickens to say that he's no Shakespeare. Of course, The Sopranos has had more bad seasons than The Wire, but that is in part because it has had more seasons than The Wire. So, I would say that The Wire is perhaps the second-best series on television ever. Welcome Back, Kotter, of course, rounds out the top three. Talk about a realistic portrayal of urban school life!
In re: the comparison between me and Bunk: Are you calling me fat?
I agree with you that Bunk is a wonderful character, and I agree with you that the list of great characters is nearly as long as the cast list itself. My favorite, Snoop aside, is Omar, and I missed him last night. I'll take more Bunk, more Omar, and less of the Baltimore Sun. Why, you ask, have I had such a negative reaction to the Sun crew? The brilliance of this show is its complexity: Never before, apart from the novels of Richard Price or the genius George Pelecanos (both of whom write for The Wire, naturally), have we had such a fully realized, tangled-up, humane, and morally ambiguous portrayal of the black inner-city, and not only its criminal underclass, but the cops who fight the robbers: Bunny Colvin, the erstwhile mayor of Hamsterdam, was one of David Simon's greatest creations, and, in a just world, Clarke Peters, who plays Det. Lester Freamon, would win a bucketful of Emmys. (Of course, the show has won exactly no Emmys, which is insane and worthy of much discussion.)
In our early glimpse of the Sun newsroom, we're not seeing much in the way of gray: just asshole bosses, a fantasy-camp city editor, a brooding and envious general assignment reporter and his naive-seeming Hispanic colleague, who gave us the most unrealistic moment last night: After she is publicly humiliated by the grammarians of the city desk, she actually seems grateful. Give me a break.
I have to tell you, David, I'm worried about this: We all know that David Simon is obsessed by the injustices wrought against the Sun, his former employer, but I'm hoping that his desire for revenge hasn't blinded him to the need for dramatic complexity.
Best,Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: Does the Journalism Feel Clichéd Because We're Journalists?Posted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 12:12 PM ET
Jeff,
Having now seen the episode again—I watched the first time when my wife was out, which is a hanging offense in our house, so I had to do a second viewing with her—I share some of your concerns about the Sun newsroom. I actually like the darkly ambitious white-boy reporter. He reminds me powerfully of, oh, three or four or 40 friends at the Post and Times. And the exchange about the photo of the burned doll was inspired. But you're right that most of the newsroom characters—the crusty, big-hearted city editor, the pompous editor, the crotchety grammar-fascist old-timer—arrive as caricatures, and do very little in Episode 1 to flesh themselves out.
Still, it's not surprising that the newspaper seems familiar—and trite—to us, because it's the ocean we swim in. If we were drug dealers or cops (God help the public!), maybe we would have felt the same way about Episode 1 of The Wire's first season. Maybe drunk-cynical-but-brilliant homicide detective McNulty is just as much a cliché in Copworld as cranky-romantic-and-fearless city editor Gus is in ours. Maybe we have to make a conscious effort to watch the newspaper subplot as outsiders rather than insiders. If we watch as insiders, we're bound to be disappointed: It will inevitably feel clichéd or dishonest.
Don't you think that Simon is taking Mayor Carcetti a little too far to the dark side? When we left him at the end of Season 4, his political ambitions and his idealism were synchronized: They fed on each other. Now he's nothing but naked political ambition. If I'm remembering correctly, the very first words he speaks in the episode are about crime stats, the subject he spent all of last season deriding. I suspect he'd be more realistic, and more interesting, if they let him retain some trace of his old goo-goo self.
Oh, and calling you a "Teddy Bear" was too subtle for you? You need me to spell it out?
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: Baltimore Is No Longer a Viable EnterprisePosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 2:14 PM ET
Dear David,
I admit, I wondered whether my reaction to the newsroom scenes was one of contempt born of familiarity. And it's certainly true that I've run into editors who have been monochromatically assholish, and reporters who absolutely burned with ambition. Why, it's even been said that I have, on occasion, burned with ambition. You, too, burn with ambition, but it's not so noticeable, because you're so unambitious about it.
But: I think I know a little bit about cops, being related to cops, and, more to the point, having written about cops, and David Simon's cops generally pass the verisimilitude test, and this newsroom, so far at least, does not. But, as they say on the TV news, only time will tell.
I don't see what you see in Carcetti. He's not shaking anyone down, is he? He's just trying to better his city and himself, which is what you'd expect. And his attack on the scumbag U.S. Attorney seemed motivated by righteous fury. It's no surprise that a sitting mayor would have an appreciation for low crime statistics. I've actually thought that Carcetti was, in a way, a stand-in for David Simon, who is made angry by—well, most everything, as Mark Bowden's new piece in the Atlantic shows—but mostly by the systematic abandonment of urban America. The bleakest moments for me in The Wire have not been the scenes of drug violence (although the harassment of Bubbles last season did break my heart), but those very effective moments, many starring Carcetti, which persuasively show that Baltimore itself is no longer a viable enterprise, and the reason it's not is because it is populated mainly by poor African-Americans, about whom America—Barack Obama notwithstanding—still doesn't give a shit. America's general disinterest in The Wire (and certainly the general disinterest of the people who vote for the Emmys) is a corollary to this larger disinterest, by the way.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: How Do You Follow Up the Best Season of the Best Show Ever?Updated Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:17 PM ET
Remember that time you had an awesome college girlfriend and you hadn't seen her all summer and it was finally the first day back on campus? That's approximately how I feel about the return of The Wire for its fifth and final season.
As Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg observed a year ago, The Wire is not merely the best show on television now, but the best show that has ever been on television. And Season 4, which focused on the catastrophic lives of four Baltimore schoolboys, was The Wire's best season. So, Season 5 has a practically impossible task: It's following the best season ever of the best show ever—how could it not be a letdown? (Compare this to The Sopranos, The Wire's rival for show of the century. The Sopranos limped into its final run, coming off two bad years. Its last episodes—which really were incredible—seemed even better because they followed dud seasons. The Wire has no such luck.)
Here's a good sign: Season 5 begins with a tight close-up on the face of homicide detective Bunk Moreland, who's in the process of conning a particularly dim murder suspect into confessing, in part by rigging up a Xerox machine as a "lie detector." Bunk, the profane teddy bear, is one of my favorite Wire regulars (though that list is so long it's hardly worth keeping anymore: Bunk, Omar, Clay Davis, Stringer Bell, Prop Joe, Herc, Snoop, Namond, Dukie, Norman, Cutty …). Now that I think of it, Jeff, if you were a Wire character, you'd be Bunk—funny, ironic, lovable, and brilliant. Anyway, if this season is going to give us plenty of Bunk, it's going to be all right with me.
That said, I found the opening episode promising but a little too busy. It threw a huge number of balls in the air, almost too many to follow: a brewing battle between Marlo and Prop Joe; the collapse of the police department, McNulty's return to alcoholism, womanizing, and the homicide squad; Bubbles' sorry attempt at rehab; a shady real estate deal rigged by the city-council president; the investigation of Clay Davis; Carcetti's descent into pure political opportunism; Herc's new dirty tricks; Dukie's failure as a drug dealer. … And I am skipping a bunch, notably the Baltimore Sun, which is going to be a central character in Season 5 the way the schools were in Season 4 and the docks were in Season 2.
I'm a little worried about the Baltimore Sun plot. I've had two brief conversations with David Simon—he's a friend of a friend—and my wife has had two long ones. In all four of those exchanges, Simon demonstrated an obsession with the Sun that bordered on monomania. There Hanna and I were, slobbering to him about Omar, and Simon kept changing the subject to stories that his editors had screwed up 19 years ago. I'm praying that his fury at the Sun won't overwhelm his genius for storytelling. The signs in Episode 1 are good: The Sun characters—most notably city editor Gus Haynes—are vivid and humane, and there's only one heavy-handed scene (the one where the Sun's blowhard editor squashes a story idea). And it gets the newspaper uniform—the cheap looking ties and dingy striped dress shirts—exactly right.
Finally, let me pay homage to the miracle of Snoop: She utters only one sentence, and it's the best line in the episode. She's explaining to a reluctant partner of Marlo how she'll retaliate if he doesn't cooperate: "We will be brief with all you mother-----rs—I think you know."
Best,David
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: Do We Really Want a President Who Would Skip The Wire Premiere?Posted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:17 PM ET
Dear Jeff,
Speaking of Obama, did you know that The Wire is one of his favorite shows? But—and here's the kind of scoop that makes Slate the must-read that it is—according to my colleague Chris Beam, Obama actually missed last night's premiere. I know Obama's busy, but The Wire is The Wire! Doesn't the Manchester, N.H., Radisson have HBO?
As for your excellent observation that The Wire is bleakest when it shows the nonviability of Baltimore, I've been puzzling over that question for a long time. When I was in college, during the depths of the crack epidemic, it was widely believed that the American city was doomed. Sure, centerless megasuburbs like Phoenix would survive, but the sunny-side-up city, with a rich delicious center, was written off. In the 20 years since, though, center cities have bounced back: most notably New York, but lots of other ones, too—Boston, Chicago, even our own fair city of Washington, D.C., have filled back in with downtowns livelier than they were 30 years ago. So, why is the renaissance not universal? Why are some cities worse than ever? For a sheltered white yuppie like me, Baltimore remains a terrifying, I Am Legend-nightmare, where any wrong turn can take you down a street that's at once empty and terrifying.
So, what is it, ultimately, that distinguishes the New Yorks from the Baltimores? Is it race? Or poverty? Or the vagaries of the global economy? (New York has rebounded because Wall Street and the entertainment industry have had 15 fantastic years.) Or governing and policing strategies? Is it truly inevitable that Baltimore must fail?
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: I Get Why David Simon Is AngryPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:47 PM ET
Dear David,
Well, you're one deep-thinking dude. I thought we were going to talk about killer Snoop and Robin Hood Omar the whole time.
Let's look at the cities you mentioned: New York is New York, the world capital of finance. So, it has the money to stay afloat. Boston is the world academic center. If Washington goes out of business, America goes out of business. Baltimore, on the other hand, has what? Johns Hopkins, which is something, but not enough. It doesn't give meaning to Baltimore the way Yale gives meaning to New Haven, and believe me, as someone who lived in New Haven (don't worry, Yale wouldn't have taken me in a million years; it was my wife that brung me to that dance), New Haven is barely floating. What else does Baltimore have? That crappy Inner Harbor, with its wildly overpriced aquarium and its World's Fair-circa-1972 feel? Some cities get passed by, and some don't. Baltimore seems to have been passed by. And you're on to something: The percentage of a city's population that's African-American has something to do with the overall health of the city; there's simply no way around the fact that the murder and sickness and general debasement of urban African-Americans don't register as crises to most Americans. Every time I read a front-page story about death in Baghdad, I ask myself: How many African-Americans died violent deaths in the same time period in American cities, without anything more than a news brief to record the awful fact? In other words, I get why David Simon is angry.
By the way, Obama's love of The Wire speaks well of him. I don't picture Hillary going in for this sort of thing.
Jeff
From: John SwansburgTo: Jeffrey Goldberg and David PlotzSubject: David Simon RespondsPosted Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, at 5:25 PM ET
David and Jeff,
A quick note from your TV Club editor. It seems David Simon came across David's first TV Club post on a blog called Ubiquitous Marketing and had a few thoughts on it. Here they are:
Just curious:
What were the circumstances at which those conversations occurred? When I am at say, at a book-release party with a bunch of journos, or at a wedding table, where I am seated exclusively with newspaper people, or simply talking to a noted reporter or editor, the conversation is often about journalism and quite naturally, my unlikely transition from newspapering to television also is a topic and yes, I am very blunt about what went bad for me at The Sun, and for many, many others there as well.
If it were at a party of say, Baltimore cops, then the drug war, or the copshop, or the bar tab itself would predominate. And journalism and/or my experiences in journalism would go unmentioned in any regard.
Entertainment industry people? We talk about the business.
Drug dealers? We talk about the, um, business.
And in all instances when people come up to me to discuss how much they love them some Omar and how he's the bestest character ever, well, okay, my eyes do glaze to the point of distraction and I do desperately try to change the subject back to whatever the collective conversational zeitgeist might be at a given gathering.
I was a newspaperman from my high school paper until I left the Sun at age 35. It was a delight to me. It informs my work in myriad ways. At some point, it went bad. And the fact is, you'll not find me speaking openly against the fellows who made it go bad for long after my departure. I held my tongue pretty well despite my low regard for those fellows. But in 2000, five years after I left The Sun, those cats finally made clear that they had dragged The Sun into a journalistic fraud through the same myopia and indifference that later cost [Howell] Raines and Gerald Boyd their careers, except they did so despite private warnings about the reporter who was the problem. Why yes, at that point—which you describe as 19 years ago, though it is in fact, seven—I got angry and vocal and direct.
Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow are notable journalists with impressive resumes. They have done some fine things, I am sure. But in Baltimore, in their hunger for prizes, they tolerated and defended a reporter who was making it up wholesale. Events, quotes, meetings at which people were supposed to have spoken powerfully about The Sun's powerful coverage of a Pulitzer-worthy issue but never said any such thing—it was simply farce. Yet even after that third retracted article, they continued to defend the behavior as the honest mistakes of a good, aggressive reporter.
To flourish, shit like that relies on silence and fear within the newsroom, and complicity within the industry itself. And at the point when the third story had been retracted in full and these guys were still trying to mitigate the fraud and accept no responsibility for it, I resolved that I was going to speak to it openly and without regard to decorum. I make no apologies whatsoever for that. I grew up a newspaperman; I do not know how to regard newspapermen who would go out of their way, over a period of years, to continually retract stories by the same reporter and continue to defend such. And so, when I meet other journos, I am full-throated in a way that everyone still in the game never manages to be when it comes to a yet-to-be-outed Blair, Bragg, Kelley, or Glass. These scandals keep coming one after another and everyone pretends that they are aberrations, that the only guilty parties have all been caught, that there isn't an underlying and fundamental problem with prizes and ambition and accountability that is inherent within the shrinking pond that is print journalism.
I loved my newspaper and I loved working for my newspaper; and given the basic ethics of newspapering, I don't know how not to be angry over what happened there. You want to call that sour grapes? No problem. Call it spoiled roast. It is what it is. I got in the business thinking certain things about journalism; naively, maybe, I took that shit to heart. My mistake, apparently.
That said, if you've ever taken an Introduction to Logic course, you know that Argumentum Ad Hominem, while a stock maneuver in most half-assed journalism and commentary, is the weakest sort of intellectual crutch. If you are serious in addressing something, then ideas matter, not the man. The Wire's depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it. I've got a secret for you cats: Ed Burns has some pretty fierce feelings about the people he worked for and with in the Baltimore Police Department and the Baltimore Public School System. Do you really believe that insiders in the B.P.D. and school system can't recognize certain specific references to reality in the previous 50 hours of television? Writers of fiction cannibalize their most meaningful experiences and then regurgitate them and hope for the best. There is nothing at all new to this.
The only difference between your discussion of seasons one through four and the current one seems to be that you did not encounter Ed Burns at a party. Next time we meet, remind me to talk about the Orioles parsimony when it comes to pitching or my complete collection of Professor Longhair albums in order that you might be able to address yourselves to the work itself, for better or for worse.
Best,
David Simon
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: All Thrust, No VectorPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 7:42 AM ET
David,
Well, you've achieved the possible—you've pissed off David Simon. You have now gone where, well, thousands of people have gone before. Perhaps it was this line of yours, from last week's dialogue, that triggered the attack: "The Wire is not merely the best show on television now, but the best show that has ever been on television."
What did you expect after you delivered yourself of such praise? A thank you? A basket of muffins?
I reread Mark Bowden's excellent piece on Simon in this month's issue of my magazine, the Atlantic, after receiving Simon's complaint about you. Bowden, like you, is an unabashed partisan of the show: "The show's boxed sets blend nicely on the bookshelf with the great novels of American history," he wrote. Naturally, Simon is infuriated with him, as well. In the course of unpacking Simon's epic, unidirectional dispute with Bill Marimow and John Carroll, the one-time Baltimore Sun editors who, in Simon's view, destroyed the paper, Bowden makes an obvious mistake: He decides to remain neutral in the fight. "When I discovered," Bowden wrote, "after my last conversation with Simon, that the final season of the show would be based on his experiences at The Sun, I felt compelled to describe the dispute, but I resolved to characterize it without entering it." Bowden showed Simon a draft of his piece, "which provoked a series of angry, long-winded accusations" in which Simon impugned Bowden's journalistic integrity to the editor of the Atlantic, which is amusing, of course, because Bowden is one of the five or six best reporters in America.
Which brings me back to your first posting and Simon's response to it. Simon accuses you of … I'm not sure what, precisely. Violating his privacy by reporting on a conversation you had at a wedding? Sort of. Mischaracterizing that conversation? Not exactly, either, since he pretty much admits that, in conversation with other reporters, he's fairly monomaniacal on the subject of Marimow and Carroll and their manifold sins. His lengthy post seems to confirm your analysis. As did the second episode, which I'll get to, briefly, in a second. But to conclude this sorry conversation: This is a man who is all thrust, no vector. He's mad at the rapacious capitalists who have destroyed the American city, and he's mad at reporters who praise him. A little bit of discernment would be useful here. I don't know much about the Carroll-Marimow years at the Sun, but I do know that Marimow, as a reporter, was one of the greats, taking on a grotesque and frightening Philadelphia Police Department, and changing his city for the better, and I do know that Carroll quit the Los Angeles Times rather than gut its newsroom.
Which is why his Carroll stand-in, the dim-bulb, corporate hack executive editor, seems like a semi-unreal character to me. Very few big-city-paper editors are quite so ostentatiously stupid and venal as the Carroll of Simon's imagination, and so, once again, the Sun subplot was not at all compelling to me. Also, it's almost ridiculously telegraphed. We've learned that the overambitious Templeton is already suspected of creating a Baltimore variant of Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" (we've learned this thanks to a most unnaturally perceptive city desk), and we also know that top management just adores our sweater-vest-wearing Stephen Glass and is giving him the opportunity to write a Pulitzer-bait "Dickensian" series (I like the way Simon subverts the Dickens meme by associating it with one of his villains) on a city classroom. I have no idea what will happen to McNulty and Bunk and Marlo and Proposition Joe. I have a very good idea what will happen in the Baltimore Sun newsroom. But I'll let you defend Simon from the charge of excessive obviousness.
It's a shame that Simon gets in the way of his own great work; he's doing something very important here. I was reminded of this by the discovery last week in a Washington house of the decomposing bodies of four girls, who were not found by neighbors, or the police, or the schools, or by child protection agencies, but by marshals acting on behalf of a mortgage company that was foreclosing on the property. How can this horror happen in America? David Simon is one of the few people asking this question.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Too Much Moralizing, Not Enough OmarPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 10:06 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
At the risk of making this a Slate dialogue that is mostly about itself, let me just say a few more words about Simon's furious response to my post last week. And those words are: He was right. It was wrong for me to write about social conversations we had at a mutual friend's wedding and book party. He had every right to expect privacy when we talked and to be angry when I turned the conversations into journalistic fodder.
OK, back to the show. There was something off about the second episode, but I don't think it's the Sun subplot. The conniving ascent of the Cooke/Glass fabulist, egged on by the two evil editors, doesn't bother me the way it bothers you. I agree that it's obvious—I don't think the Sun editor needed both horns and a pitchfork—but it's not boring. In fact, my favorite part of the episode is the bull session in the Sun's loading dock. How could you not crack up at Gus' riff about the mother of four who died from an allergic reaction to blue crabs: "Ever notice how 'mother of four' is always catching hell? Murder. Hit and run. Burned up in row house fire. Swindled by bigamists." I'm giggling just typing it. "Swindled by bigamists"—give that writer an Emmy!
So, it's not the newsroom that's confounding me. No, I think the problem is that The Wire has gotten preachy. The show has always had a didactic streak, but a relatively subtle one. For all that Simon is seething with righteous anger, he never let that overwhelm the show. It was a backbeat. He let the story and the characters do the work, and didn't lay the lessons on thick. Like the great journalist that he is, he showed, he didn't tell. He and his colleagues understood that no "the game is rigged" speech could ever mean one-fiftieth as much as, say, the momentary shot of Dukie selling drugs at the end of Season 4.
But the first two episodes of this season repeatedly pause—stop dead—for heavy-handed moralizing. It didn't bother me in Episode 1—I figured they were just breaking us in—but now I'm getting worried. Just checking my notes from Episode 2, I see:
1. The hooker's overwrought speech about her addiction
2. Lester's majestic peroration about the importance of the Clay Davis case
3. Steve Earle's exhortation to Bubbs, urging him to stop bottling up his sorrow about Sherrod and live again
4. The face-off between Gus and the Sun's editor about their schools series—the editor pompous, Gus biting, both sermonizing
5. Michael's conscience-ridden argument with Chris and Snoop about killing a guy who may have insulted Marlo
6. Bunk, Lester, and Jimmy's chorus about the devaluation of black men's lives ("You can go a long way in this country killing black folk.")
In every one of these scenes, The Wire's characters are just a bit too grandiloquent, their dialogue a shade too portentous. Maybe because this is the final season, Simon and Ed Burns don't want to leave anything unsaid, but they're saying too much.
Two episodes and counting without Omar! On the upside, Avon Barksdale is back, and flashing that awesome West Baltimore "W" hand signal. We need one of those—a three-finger "S"—for Slate.
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: Give Me More Clay Davis!Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 11:01 AM ET
Dear David,
I appreciate your deep morals, I really do. But still: Your post was fairly inoffensive and had the benefit of being true. So, no guilt!
Like you, I love the expression "swindled by bigamists." David Simon and his writers love words, and I love them for loving words. That said, I thought the scene in which this marvelous line was embedded, on the loading dock, was forced and ostentatious and heavy-handed. Why not just have St. City Editor say, "Man, Baltimore hacks are so witty and hard-boiled and yet they have hearts of gold, all except that yuppie shit who is obviously going to Jayson Blair our newspaper half to death."
I was so busy hating the Baltimore Sun story line that I neglected to notice what you picked up: that it's not only the reporters who are ardently speechifying. I don't mind speeches—give me more Clay Davis any day! It's the moralizing that's getting me. Why do they have to tell us that the lives of black men are cast away by our society? Isn't that the whole point of this show? We get it. We've been watching for years.
These occasional bumps in the writing are not so noticeable in most cases because the acting is so good—otherworldly good. Have you noticed that Isiah Whitlock Jr., as the febrile and corrupt Clay Davis, is a genius? One question I'm always left with after an episode of The Wire is this: Where will these brilliant African-Americans actors go when The Wire is finished? Maybe this is why David Simon is so pissed—he knows that Hollywood hasn't figured out how to showcase large quantities of black talent and fears for the careers of his cast. I can't think of another cast of such astonishingly good unknown actors, except maybe for The Sopranos—though if you watch Goodfellas carefully, you'll see that they're all there. (Weirdly, Isiah Whitlock Jr. was also in Goodfellas.) So, let's have a moment of appreciation for Lance Reddick, who plays Cedric Daniels; and our mutual favorite, Wendell Pierce, who plays Bunk; and, of course, Clarke Peters, who plays Lester Freamon; and Andre Royo as Bubbles; and Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield; and, for his voice alone, Anwan Glover as Slim Charles. The list goes on and on. Every so often, the writing fails, but the cast never does.
As Sarah Silverman says, I have a dream, too: My dream is that some savvy Shakespeare company hires, en masse, the cast of The Wire for what would be just a thrilling Julius Caesar. Wood Harris, who plays Avon Barksdale, has already appeared in Troilus and Cressida. Just imagine him as Brutus.
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Where Is Simon Going With the Parallel Fraud Plots?Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 11:49 AM ET
Jeff,
One of the weirdest moments of my Wire offseason was when I spotted Clay Davis—I mean Isiah Whitlock Jr.—playing a goofy dad in a Verizon cell phone commercial. Much to my disappointment, his several lines didn't include his trademark "sheee-it." (Maybe he could do late-night toilet paper spots instead?) And he's not the only one of The Wire's great black actors who's moonlighting to make ends meet: Lance "Cedric Daniels" Reddick brightened my NFL watching this year by showing up as the new face of Cadillac.
I share your amazement at the concentration of acting talent on The Wire, and your concern about what will happen to all these great black actors now that the show is ending. I'm hoping that they get to cash in on their talent the way Idris Elba (Stringer Bell) has since his character got murdered at the end of Season 3. But I fear you're right that Hollywood isn't going to figure out a way to employ idiosyncratic geniuses like Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Michael K. Williams, and Anwan Glover as anything but "Street Thug #3" in crime dramas.
Where are Simon & Co. going with the parallel fraud plots? We've got the newsroom con artist Scott fabricating a sob-story 13-year-old cripple to advance his own career. And now Jimmy McNulty is fabricating a serial killer to … do what exactly?
Seeing it for a second time, it occurs to me that the final minutes of the episode, when Jimmy turns an accidental death into a homicide while Bunk observes in horror, is a grim echo of that Season 1 scene when Jimmy and Bunk solve a murder with nothing but gestures and 38 utterances of the word "fuck." Watch the "fuck" scene again: It is one of the Wire's all-time great moments.
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: Templeton Needs a Big Story and McNulty's Selling OnePosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 1:30 PM ET
David,
It's not only actors on The Wire who have a tendency to show up in dispiriting commercials: The guy who played Agent Harris on The Sopranos now appears as a chef in a Campbell Soup commercial, and—if you don't mind me saying so—looks like a fuckwad.
And speaking of fuck, you're right, that scene between Bunk and Jimmy possesses Raging Bull-quality fuckedness. (Have you ever seen the Flintstones version? Hysterical.)
Where are Simon & Co. going with the parallel fraud plots? It seems to me that he'll have to merge them. Stephen Glass needs a big story, and McNulty's selling one. I can't imagine McNulty having trouble closing the deal; Scott is dying for the story that gets him to the promised land of the Washington Post metro section. Ordinarily, I'd predict that Scott gets chewed up in the process, but isn't David Simon's main complaint against his one-time bosses at the Sun that they protected a Pulitzer-bound fabricator, rather than expose him? I feel like I've read about this complaint of his a dozen times already.
You've noticed, of course, that more people write about The Wire than actually watch it? The magazine articles never stop coming.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Avon ReturnsPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET
Jeff,
I know what you mean about the endless Wire commentary. I'm having a hard time separating what I see on the show from what I read in the papers (and magazines, and blogs). Sometimes that's because what I'm seeing on the show is what I am reading in the papers. During the episode last night, it's-hard-to-be-a-saint-in-the-city editor Gus Haynes savages the Sun editor's idea for a public schools expose:
[If] you want to look at who these kids really are, you have to look at the parenting or lack of it in the city, the drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. … It's like you're up on the corner of a roof and you're showing some people how a couple shingles came loose. Meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house.
This morning, I read the Columbia Journalism Review's opus about Simon's war with Marimow and Carroll and saw this quote from Simon:
You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that's kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.
It's a great metaphor, incidentally.
Let me just return to my other favorite moment in last night's episode: the visiting-room negotiation between Avon and Marlo. It plays a great trick by making us root for the heartless murderer Avon because he's putting one over on the even-more-despicable Marlo. (That kind of sympathy manipulation is a specialty of The Wire. See also: Prop Joe, Omar, Bodie …) Also, how great was the final moment of chitchat between them, when Avon, hungry for details about the street, asks: "What about you, how you been?" And Marlo answers with a shrug: "You know. The game is the game." That's what I'm going to start saying whenever anyone asks me about my job.
David
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 3: Whiplashed by Jimmy McNulty's FallPosted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 6:31 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
Maybe it was just that melodramatically tight closing shot of Omar—thank God! Omar—distraught over Butchie's death, but I thought there was a slight telenovela feel to Episode 3. Or maybe it is the too-fast way the show has altered its characters this season. We're not in Bold and the Beautiful territory—no one has suddenly remembered that she's actually a lesbian incest victim—but McNulty, Marlo, and Clay Davis have all become very different men, very fast. Sen. Davis, who has always projected omnicompetence in his sleazy dealings, is uncharacteristically panicky as the grand jury investigation tightens around him. Marlo, who's terrifying because of his total lack of affect, cracked this week, revealing an unexpected anxiety about his money.
And Jimmy McNulty—well, what to say about Jimmy's extreme makeover? In this episode, Jimmy embellishes his serial-killer fabrication, inventing—over Bunk's fierce objections and with the help of a flask of Jameson's—a murderer who targets homeless men and marks his victims with red ribbons.* Jimmy plants evidence, tampers with a corpse, and forges documents, drinking and screwing blondes in the few minutes he's not inventing crimes. I'm whiplashed by Jimmy's fall: We've always known that his sweet domesticity couldn't last, but don't you think this nose dive is too much, too quickly?
As for the serial-killer plot itself, I'm ambivalent. It seems a little far-fetched to imagine that Jimmy and ultimate good cop Lester could betray the job so easily. On the other hand, Simon proved in Season 3 that he could take an outlandish premise and make it enthralling. The drug-legalization zone of Hamsterdam, the great idea of Season 3, was as far-fetched as Jimmy's fake serial killer, and Simon made it utterly gripping and persuasive. Maybe he will do it again this year.
What I loved most in this episode was its variations on the theme of escape, or rather, the impossibility of it. The scene of Marlo, fish out of water, trying to get his money at the Antilles bank reminded me of Season 4's most powerful moment, when Bunny took the kids to a fancy downtown restaurant and they panicked. Then there was Omar's brief fling with beach life at the end of the episode, another reminder that the game will keep sucking you back in. And there was Michael and Dukie's glorious day out at the amusement park, which ends with Michael in trouble for leaving the corner. Some of the best scenes in The Sopranos were when the insular characters encountered the outside world—Vito hiding out in the New Hampshire B&B, Paulie and Chrisopher lost in the snowy pine barrens. The Wire too understands the power of claustrophobia, the terrible difficulty of leaving the familiar.
As for the newspaper subplot, the less said, the better. (I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said, "do more with less" this season—I could afford to take the Sun buyout.)
David
Correction, Jan. 22, 2008: The article originally stated that McNulty relied on the help of Jim Beam. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: Does the Baltimore Sun Not Have a Web Site?Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET
Dear David,
Since you won't take on the newspaper subplot, let me.
But before I do, let me attach myself to your comments re: the terrible difficulty of leaving the familiar. There is one other Sopranos analogy here, in this case, having to do with Adriana's disappearance. You'll recall a meeting at the offices of the FBI, when one of the agents suggests that Adriana might have not, in fact, been murdered but had instead taken off to China. This suggestion was met by looks of absolute incredulity from her colleagues. It was an absurd notion, the idea that Adriana had the will, knowledge, and wherewithal to escape North Jersey. I thought of this scene while watching Marlo at the bank. Here is the lion out of his den and, without any defenses, just a shmuck who can't speak French (which is also an apt description of me). It's a useful reminder of the completely circumscribed lives these characters lead, though I do prefer to take my Marlo straight up and affectless—I like my gangsters cold. What next? Scenes of Snoop playing with her American Girl collection?
Unlike you (presumably, since your tight-lippedness on the matter of the Baltimore Sun has me guessing just a bit), I found the newsroom scene moving, perhaps because I had just read about the latest coup at the formerly great L.A. Times; the "fellows" from Chicago—as David Simon calls them in his latest elegy to the lost world of the Sun papers—have taken to murdering their own now, firing a corporate-shill editor who wouldn't shill enough, apparently refusing to carry out more newsroom head-chopping during the labor-intensive presidential campaign.
That scene in the newsroom was near perfect because it had the power of truth, right down to the moment when the patrician executive editor, Whiting, forces his sweaty, ferretish managing editor, Klebanow (sounds like …), to deliver the actual bad news. How can your heart not break for 40- and 50-year-old reporters, with no discernible skills other than the ability to work the phones, who are cast adrift by a newspaper company that still makes barrels of money?
The problem, of course, is that these realistic scenes of newsroom life circa 2008 are undermined by deeply unrealistic scenes of newsroom life circa never. In other words, why does Roger Twigg, the discarded police reporter, have to be so encyclopedically perfect? Why does Scott, the unpleasant upstart, have to be so ostentatiously Glass-ian (or Blair-ian)? And why is there no reference whatsoever to the newspaper's Web site? Simon makes it clear in his Washington Post Outlook piece that he neither knows very much nor cares very much about the Web, but doesn't reality demand that we see the newsroom of the Sun feeding the beast? All this talk of finals and double dots is so archaic. Are you telling me that the cub reporter, Alma Gutierrez, would run all over the city looking for an early edition of the paper before checking to see how her story was played on the Web? I just looked—the Baltimore Sun actually does have a Web site.
All this raises a larger question: Just how good was the Sun in David Simon's day? Was the golden age really so golden? I'm not equipped to answer this question. Perhaps there's someone out there who can.
Best,Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: David PlotzSubject: The Skeleton in Daniels' ClosetPosted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for figuring out why Alma's early-edition odyssey bugged me so much! A real Alma wouldn't even have woken up early to see her story. She would have checked the Web site at midnight the night before, when the paper went live (and then immediately updated her Facebook status to read "Alma Gutierrez is getting screwed by her editors," and Twittered same to 135 friends). Heck, the single act of her logging onto the free Sun Web site rather than schlepping out to buy the paper would have explained more about the newspaper crisis than 17 close-ups of Whiting's I'm-an-asshole suspenders ever could.
It's weird that The Wire clings to a 1999 vision of the newspaper—no e-mail, no texting, barely even cell phones—when it's so incredibly au courant about the practices of drug dealers. According to one of the 18 zillion Wire articles from the past couple of weeks (though I can't remember which one), New York gangbangers actually watch the show for tips on how to avoid cell-phone wiretaps and other popo surveillance.
Its newspaper Luddism gives me another thought: The Wire is in many ways the useful counterpoint to another cultic TV show that began around the same time, 24. In 24, conspiracies are everywhere and institutions are corrupt, but technology is omnipotent and the individual can triumph. In The Wire, conspiracies are everywhere and institutions are corrupt, but technology always betrays us, and the individual can never triumph. All anyone can hope for is sheltered, private happiness. Needless to say, I find The Wire much truer to the world I live in. (Hmm, does this help explain why 24 is revered by Republicans and The Wire by Democrats? I have to think about that.)
I'm not a newspaper guy, and I lack the profound emotional connection to them that drives Simon. So, I'm skeptical about this newspaper nostalgia. Our mutual friend and Slate media critic Jack Shafer has explained that the newspaper glory years—1950s through the '80s, right Jack?—were anomalous, a period of artificially high profits that allowed papers to overstaff, throw resources into huge projects, and avoid the exigencies that plague most competitive businesses. So, maybe what's happening now isn't a rape, but a long overdue correction. And maybe it's not true that smaller newspapers mean less journalism—or even less great journalism. Web journalism is thriving. So is magazine journalism. Public radio is bigger and better than ever. It's true that they're not the same as newspaper journalism. Certain wonderful kinds of newspaper stories don't get done anymore. On the other hand, it doesn't mean they're worse. I like Thomas Edsall even more as a blogger and political analyst at the Huffington Post than I did when he was a campaign-finance reporter for the Washington Post.
Now you've made me talk about all the newspaper stuff I vowed to avoid! Let's get back to the show. I've forgotten: What was it that Cedric Daniels did wrong, deep in his past? (It's the All the King's Men subplot: Everyone, even Saint Cedric, is dirty: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.")
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: I Will Not Be Criticizing the Baltimore Sun Plot Today Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 11:38 AM ET
Dear David,
Sorry, I don't see the All the King's Men subplot. Cedric Daniels is the personification of rectitude. I like the character, but he always struck me as one of David Simon's less complicated creations. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this episode of alleged corruption buried in Daniels' past seems to be a bit of a red herring. I can't even remember what it was he's said to have done wrong; I think the allegation dates to when he ran McNulty's squad. Now you're forcing me to watch all of the first season again.
I would like to get back to Snoop and Omar and Butchie (what a man, huh?—though they should have tried water-boarding; it's quite effective, according to many Republicans), but I have to say this, in light of the firing of the editor of the Los Angeles Times: I will not be criticizing David Simon's Baltimore Sun plot today. The truth is, the battle between David Simon and the Tribune Company is the battle between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. The Forces of Good whine a lot, but I'll take David Simon's whining over corporate pillaging, gladly. There's an astonishing quote today from David Hiller, the publisher of the L.A. Times, who fired the editor (who—and this shows you how bad things have gotten—was the corporate lackey put into the editorship after the previous editors were shit-canned for standing up for their newsroom) and who will be held responsible by God for the gutting of a great American newspaper. Hiller asked, "Can you solve the newspaper industry's problems by spending more? It's an attractive theory, but it doesn't work."
Of course it doesn't. Spending more money to gather more news and hire better reporters couldn't possibly help the newspaper industry, could it?
What a barbarian. David Hiller is the Marlo Stanfield of daily journalism.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 3: Would Somebody Please Give Daniels a Sandwich?Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 12:34 PM ET
Dear Jeff,
One big difference: Marlo is a West Baltimore gangster trying to muscle in on the East Side, while Hiller is an East Side tough trying to muscle in on the West Side. (Also, I suspect that Hiller would be perfectly comfortable talking up a French-speaking bank clerk.)
Nothing more from me today about The Wire and the state of newspaper journalism. I'm going to leave that to my colleague, Slate media critic Jack Shafer. I mentioned Jack's views on newspaper nostalgia in my last entry, and I'm happy to report that he is going to write a piece today about David Simon's critique of the newspaper business. Since Jack is so much smarter than I am about this subject (and most others, for that matter), I'll read his piece to find out what I really should think.
I agree that Daniels is one of The Wire's thinner creations. (Thinner in all ways: His cadaverous frame, which is meant to suggest that rectitude you're talking about, mostly makes me think: "Someone give that man a sandwich.") That said, his mysterious ugly past is what makes him more than just a stick figure. Like Judge Irwin, he is haunted by a sin that could destroy him. At the same time, that sin—and the deep shame he feels about it—may be what turned him into the upright cop he has become. The Wire is brilliant in giving us characters who sin and overcome it, or rather, harness it to redeem themselves: Cutty, Carver, Daniels, to name a few. And they are all the more persuasive because they stand next to the weaker men, such as Herc, who refuse to own their sins.
Later,
D
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: Who Doesn't Like a Blind Bartender?Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 4:52 PM ET
Dear David,
The people of America—including the .00003 percent who watch The Wire—can rest easy now that Jack Shafer is going to weigh in on Simon. Prediction: Jack pisses him off.
This means, I suppose, that we can go back to talking about the show next week. Which is a relief, of course. A thought struck me not long ago, a dangerous one: Perhaps the weakness of the Baltimore Sun subplot is not Simon's fault, but ours. And by "ours," I mean all of us in journalism. Maybe we're just not that interesting; David Simon can't make us interesting; David Milch couldn't make us interesting; maybe even David Chase himself couldn't make us interesting. Well, maybe he couldn't make me interesting. You, he could build a show around.
An amendment to an earlier post: Alert reader (and Jack Shafer acolyte) Ryan Grim points out that, though Butchie was not water-boarded by Chris and Snoop, he was in fact "liquor-boarded," before he was shot in the legs and then murdered. Butchie's demise was unfortunate—who doesn't like a blind bartender?— but at least it brings Omar back into our lives, and, with any luck, Omar's return will set off all sorts of conflicts between Marlo and Chris and Prop Joe and Slim Charles and Cheese, all of whom are much more interesting than the sad-sack denizens of the Sun newsroom. As Mitt Romney recently said, "Woof woof."
Jeff

Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at dplotz@slate.com.

John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor.