Marbury

the death of the phone call

As everyone who owns an iPhone has had cause to remark, it performs every task beautifully except the "phone" bit. The reception is poor (no matter how you hold it), the sound quality is scratchy, and it's all too easy to get cut off mid-conversation. It's only after reading this excellent, short piece that I realised quite why Steve Jobs and co. might be rather insouciant about such bugs; barely anybody uses the phone any more:

According to Nielsen, the average number of mobile phone calls we make is dropping every year, after hitting a peak in 2007. And our calls are getting shorter: In 2005 they averaged three minutes in length; now they’re almost half that. We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die.

The author, Clive Thompson, goes to explain what he means by this: phone calls blunder into your life without letting you know they're on the way, and demand an unreasonable amount of emotional energy to negotiate.

I thought it was just me that felt like this. Or just men.

was the oil spill a fuss over not very much?

The BP spill may be going from being a "much worse" environmental disaster than everyone thought to the opposite: an over-hyped minor accident. Time's Michael Grunwald has been speaking to some marine scientists who paint a different picture to one we've read about so far:

The scientists I spoke with cite four basic reasons the initial eco-fears seem overblown. First, the Deepwater oil, unlike the black glop from the Valdez, is unusually light and degradable, which is why the slick in the Gulf is dissolving surprisingly rapidly now that the gusher has been capped. Second, the Gulf of Mexico, unlike Alaska's Prince William Sound, is very warm, which has helped bacteria break down the oil. Third, heavy flows of Mississippi River water have helped keep the oil away from the coast, where it can do much more damage. And finally, Mother Nature can be incredibly resilient. Van Heerden's assessment team showed me around Casse-tete Island in Timbalier Bay, where new shoots of Spartina grasses were sprouting in oiled marshes and new leaves were growing on the first black mangroves I've ever seen that were actually black. "It comes back fast, doesn't it?" van Heerden said.

As the report mentions, this needn't obscure the fact that the massive long-term damage that oil drilling has wreaked on the environment of coastal Louisiana.

a side of lies with your fries, sir?

Spotted in a US burger joint:

I'll take a cheeseburger, fries, and a "never heard of him".

Tom Waits would love this, wouldn't he?

I love America.

(via MR)

a fan letter from the president

Earlier this year, the author Yann Martel received a letter from a familiar address, congratulating him on his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi, which tells the story of a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger:

Martel was, understandably, utterly delighted: "Clearly he did it for personal reasons, as a reader and as a father. And in two lines, what an insightful analysis of Life of Pi. Bless him, bless him."

More background and transcript here.

(Via the always-amazing Letters of Note)

breaking up is very hard to do

Wow. This extraordinary piece by Andrew Cohen is a verbal car crash unfolding in slow motion - horrifying and transfixing. I'll let its author explain:

The great love of my life marries today and I am not the groom. I had my chance, a few years ago, but did not realize until too late how fleeting my moment with her was meant to be....The present I humbly send her today is this column; this public note, this irrevocable display of affection and support and gratitude; this worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes to him. No one ought to have to carry that with them into a marriage. I showered her with as much love as I could muster when we were together. I still love her and always will. So I am only too happy to offer my toast to her now, one more time, before she takes her vows.

What a lucky, lucky lady to have an ex-boyfriend like Andrew.

You may be wondering if this is a spoof, and it does read like something from The Onion. But it's not. It's all too sincere. It's one part broken heart, two parts therapy, three parts self-obsession, and seventy-eight thousand parts stupid. I haven't seen such a display of undigested psychic angst since watching England play Algeria.

I want to thank her for-- it's now such a cliché that I'm almost embarrassed to write it -- making me want to be a better man.

Almost embarrassed? Almost? Oh Jesus, you don't know the meaning of embarrassment. (His editor, however, should know better. Or perhaps he/she did, and hates him.) My favourite line in the whole piece is here:

I want to live on a farm one day, a farm filled with horses and wireless connections where I can write.

See? Dreamily romantic and practical.This bit screams: DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU'LL BE MISSING NOW YOU'VE MARRIED YOUR FRICKING SOULLESS EMPTY SUIT OF A BOYFRIEND? NOT THAT I'M INCAPABLE OF INSTALLING BROADBAND.

Actually, we don't learn anything about the new boyfriend/husband, or - more tellingly - the ex-girlfriend. The writer Lizzie Skurnick has written a very sharp and funny rejoinder, for the same publication:

A kinder colleague than I suggested that his column was the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman, in "The Graduate," running into the church to yell, "Elaine!" I humbly submit that his wedding day appreciation is in fact the equivalent of Andrew Cohen running into the church and yelling, "Andrew!"

dancing in the streets

This is stunning - like The Wire in ballet:

(Hat tip: AW)

the optimist

David Mendell's account of Rod Blagojevich's life post-impeachment is now behind a paywall, but for Blago fans like us it's essential reading. Mendell paints a portrait of a man who, though he is undoubtedly a gold-plated buffoon (how the hell was he allowed to run anything, let alone an entire state?) is impressively immune to self-doubt. He seems as chipper as ever, has his own radio show, and is convinced that his ongoing trial on corruption charges - "a bunch of bullshit" - will somehow be the (re)making of him.

Blago, of course, knew Obama was when he was a lowly state senator, and always resented his swift rise to national prominence. Which bring us to my favourite paragraph in the piece:

Leaving his radio show the next weekend, Blagojevich was greeted in the lobby by an autograph-seeker, a deeply tanned man wearing lipstick, a strawberry-blonde wig, and a dress. The cross-dresser handed Blagojevich a photograph to sign: a picture of Blagojevich and Obama sitting together at a Democratic Party event several years ago. He scrawled in black cursive, "Here are two guys whose careers have gone in opposite directions. Best, Rod Blagojevich."

saddam hussein's boots

On display at the Fort Douglas Military Museum in Salt Lake City, the boots that  Saddam was wearing when dragged out of his spiderhole in 2004:

do recessions breed superstition?

We know - from our observing own behaviour or that of those around us - that people are more likely to resort to superstitious beliefs when they're under stress (in the same way that there are no atheists in a falling plane) but is there a general rise in superstition during hard economic times, and the extra anxiety they bring? A recent study of the price of personalised number plates in China suggests there might be, because the price of number plates with "unlucky" numbers falls disproportionately during hard times:

Travis Ng and colleagues investigated the value of Hong Kong car number plates purchased through auction from 1997 to 2009 and found that an ordinary 4-digit plate with one extra lucky ’8′ was sold 63.5 per cent higher on average. An extra unlucky ’4′ by contrast diminished the average 4-digit plate value by 11 per cent. In Cantonese the number “8″ rhymes with “prosperity” whereas the number “4″ sounds like the word for “death.” Moreover the fluctuations in the prices of lucky and unlucky plates mirrored the economic fluctuations with unlucky numbers dropping the most during recessions.

(via Bruce Hood)

is bradass87 a hero?

The Guardian has the fascinating backstory of the Afghan war logs. The insider fingered for the leaks is Bradley Manning, whose online name was Bradass87. Manning contacted a well-known Californian computer hacker, Adrian Lamo, and immediately told him about his job and his access to massive amounts of confidential information:

Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.

(Should have known Lady Gaga would play a role in this somewhere.)

Unfortunately for Manning, Lamo contacted the security services, who immediately arrested him and locked him up. For Daniel Ellsberg, and for many others, Manning is a "new hero". For me, not so much. I suppose one of the qualifications for hero-status, in my mind, is that the person shouldn't be overly concerned with their own heroism. My impression is that the man who styled himself "bradass" longed a bit too much for the limelight. This is how Manning opened the conversation with Lamo - a complete stranger, remember:

"hi... how are you?… im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad … if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?"

This is how he continued:

He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things … that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … almost criminal political backdealings … the non-PR version of world events and crises."

The breathless tone pretty much screams LOOK AT ME, I'M A HERO WAITING TO HAPPEN.

Well he is, now, by virtue of his massive data-dump which reveals, when all is said and done, two things about this war:

- It's really shitty for Afghans.

- It's chaotic.

Not that these don't bear repeating, but they're hardly revelations in the manner of Ellsberg's leak of the Pentagon papers, which really did tell us things we didn't know - things we needed to know - about the decision-making process behind the Vietnam war.

I can't say if this has harmed the security of our troops. But I don't think it's advanced the cause of peace. This information gives us a measure of insight into what it's like on the ground of a massive war - but how much did we need that, and what cost was it worth paying to obtain? As far as I can see, two things have been satisfied by this leak: bradass87's desire for notoriety, and our need for voyeurism.

joke of the week

From an old interview with Ben Schott:

Knock knock."

Who's there?

"Control freak. Now you say 'Control freak who?'"

how to cut somebody

We've discussed the rules of conversation but how do you avoid, or even subtly insult, somebody you don't even wish to have a conversation with? Then you need to know what it means to "cut" somebody, and how. This definition is from the wonderfully-titled 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

I expect Peter Mandelson is very skilled at this.

Via FromOldBooks.

is every iraqi murder committed by the west?

Norm quotes from an interview with Christopher Hitchens:

I have nothing but contempt for humanitarian peaceniks... They blame the death toll on anybody but the murderers.

Even smart people like Johann Hari regularly throw about the "fact" that America's war on Iraq has killed 1.2 million people. Not only is this is a wild exaggeration, empirically speaking, but its straightforward assignation of culpability is, to say the least, deeply problematic.

When, in 2010, a Shi-ite death squad intoxicated by its own dark but highly developed ideology sends a bomb-packed van into a crowded market, do we blame the resulting forty Iraqi deaths on America and Britain? Apparently we do. I prefer to blame it, mostly, on the people what done it.

You might even detect the traces of a colonial mindset in those who blame every Iraqi murder of Iraqis on Americans; a worldview in which the only actors in this tragedy worthy of being assigned intentions and ideologies and responsibilities are Western - whereas Iraqis are merely reactors, helpless pawns in our game.

how not to be a bore

Dilbert creator Scott Adams keeps a really excellent, eclectic and always stimulating blog. His last couple of posts have been musings on the unwritten rules of conversation:

A conversation, like dancing, has some rules, although I've never seen them stated anywhere. The objective of conversation is to entertain or inform the other person while not using up all of the talking time. A big part of how you entertain another person is by listening and giving your attention. Ideally, your own enjoyment from conversation comes from the other person doing his or her job of being interesting. If you are entertaining yourself at the other person's expense, you're doing it wrong. You might think that everyone on earth understands what a conversation is and how to engage in one. My observation is that no more than a quarter of the population has that understanding.

Adams says he used to be part of the other three-quarters until he did a course that included a section on conversation, and he realised he'd been doing it all wrong.

I'm often surprised at how often I come across people who barely grasp the basics. In fact just this weekend I went to the (very excellent) Port Eliot festival in Cornwall, and one night - as you do at these things - found myself plunged into conversation with a couple of absolute strangers in a bar; one male, one female, both young (early to mid-twenties). In both cases, the briefest of questions from me ("What brings you here?" or "What do you do?" or something like that) unleashed a torrent of self-description that went on and on and on and contained a superabundance of pointless detail. As I listened (or struggled to listen) I thought, I can't even imagine imagining any stranger would be interested in this. I mention their age because I have a fogeyish anxiety that social networking sites are corroding the conversational skills of a generation.

Other times, you meet people who - like Scott - are clearly not natural conversationalists or listeners but have, to their credit, realised that and now make a conscious effort to ask questions of the other person. Trouble is, some of them still can't help but look painfully bored as soon as you start answering them.

It's certainly a more complex skill that we sometimes give it credit for. For one thing, you have find a way of actually being interested in the other person rather than seeming interested (although the latter is a good first step). As Scott says, that sometimes requires a couple of conversational "bounces" until you get to an area of mutual interest. And when you're doing the talking, you have to operate at two levels at once: making sure that what you're saying is coherent and interesting, whilst paying close attention to the other person's facial expression and eye movements to check on their attention and interest levels, and adjusting course as necessary (a lot of people, even quite good conversationalists, forget this last bit). No mean cognitive feat. Good conversation is hard.

quote of the weekend

From a fun, gossipy NYT report on the febrile social politics surrounding Chelsea Clinton's wedding:

“I’m good enough to borrow a plane from, but not good enough to be invited to the wedding?” complained one Clinton friend.

Actually I quite like this one too, from retail magnate and Clinton contributor John Catsimatidis, who has clearly mastered the passive-aggressive mode:

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘hard feelings,’ ” Mr. Catsimatidis said. “I’d use the word ‘maybe a little disappointed,’ but not ‘hard feelings.’ ”