Month: October 2011

Jon Stewart's priceless and accurate final judgment on the wackjob from Wasilla. I knew we'd all get there in the end.

Liel Leibovitz on settler violence. My own approach to Israel as a whole – and to the passion and conviction of many Jewish Americans – is laid out in this recent Ask Andrew Anything YouTube.

The Economist compares India to China:

India’s income per head … was about $3,200 in 2009 (holding purchasing power constant across time and between countries). China reached that level of development nine years ago. The lag in social progress is much longer. A child’s odds of surviving past their fifth birthday are as bad in India today as they were in China in the 1970s.

Sitting down for an interview with his co-author: 

Liz Cheney's questioning of her father was gentle, rarely challenging him or pressing him to elaborate, and giving him wide range to reflect nostalgically on his long public career. She asked him, for example, what was his favorite of the jobs he's held.

 

A reader writes:

Beautiful piece on Jobs and his uber-California mix of hippie spirituality and tech savvy. This struck me: “those who reflexively mock the counterculture miss its spiritual genius because they are incapable of the courage needed to understand it better.” Maybe you can recall this the next time you review some silly gay demonstration in Dolores Park, attended by hundreds of gay high-tech geniuses who work at Apple, Facebook, Google and the like, plus their families and children. I daresay many of them would think you’re missing some of the courage on display!

The “counterculture” in NorCal is a fabulous mix of high-tech and hippie. It’s self-absorbed and socialist. But a common thread in my experience is a stubborn rejection of the master-servant and fall-redemption stories essential to Christianity. We hug trees and climb mountains (because we have so many of both); we try to live authentically despite what preachers tell us will happen to us later; we build amazing products that people love; and we do a little too much yoga. Well, I don’t, but still.

After 6 years here, I’ve stopped sneering at the Silent Painting Protests and Meditation Slams. The smarty-pants me-first-but-you-too spirituality you admire in Jobs is thick in the air, and ripe for ridicule, but it has deep humanist and naturalist elements I’ve grown to love.

It’s both simplistic and simple. Maybe it’s all the religion we really need. It’s certainly easier for many people to embrace, especially those tired of being perpetually unrepentant.

All the philosophical trappings of Christianity you debate so vigorously on the same page as your Jobs tribute—the mysteries, the Truths lurking behind truths, the essential paradoxes, the doubts that strengthen the conclusions—fall away on a eucalyptus-scented stroll through a Redwood grove, snapping and emailing pictures on an iPhone.

Next time the Castro’s hairy bears in tutus poke fun at the religions that have humiliated them, just imagine they are Steve Jobs poking IBM with a stick. Several of them probably designed the GUI on your iPad J.

Brad Plumer reports on a new paper (pdf) finding that Yelp is destabilizing the chain restaurant business. Julian Sanchez detects a larger trend:

Imagine, then, what effect it might have if, five or ten years hence … for nearly any product consumers encountered, some kind of aggregate rating—based on whatever criteria the individual has determined are most important—would simply appear, with minimal effort. Simply looking at an aisle of products—or even passing shops on the street—I might effortlessly learn which were deemed most satisfactory by people with tastes similar to mine. … With such information more directly available, marketing would become far less relevant to the buyer—and a far less worthwhile investment for the producer. 

Or so says Thomas Rid:

If we take the notion of war seriously, not as a metaphor, then cyber war has never happened in the past — it does not take place in the present — and it is highly unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. Instead, all past and present political cyber attacks are merely sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as warfare itself: subversion, espionage, and sabotage. That is improbable to change in the years ahead.

Charlemagne disagrees:

In America, especially, cyberspace is rising up the scale of national-security threats. Britain, too, is tooling up for defence (and offence) in and through cyberspace. In the rest of Europe the debate perhaps centres more on questions of data privacy. On all sides of the Atlantic, however, cybercrime is endemic. A Google News search for “cyber attack” throws up recent news of a threat by hackers to knock out the New York Stock Exchange on October 10^th, a report on a new centre to defend America's critical infrastructure, speculation about the cause of the failure of Bank of America's online banking service, and demands by Congress for America to respond firmly to “predatory” cyberespionage by China.

Rendered literally.

Matthew Belinkie thinks Steve Jobs' greatest achievement was fusing brand and personal loyalty:

Some folks in the tech press viewed [Tuesday's] iPhone 4S announcement as a disappointment. But if that’s true, then it’s an awesome testament to just how far Steve had raised the bar. Poor Tim Cook got up there and demonstrated Suri, a new voice recognizing “personal assistant.” You ask it to remind you to buy milk when you arrived at the grocery store, and it WILL. You ask it for good burger joints in the neighborhood, and it will FIND THEM. You can now have a conversation with your phone, which used to be something that only Tony Stark could do… The term [Reality Distortion Field] was coined in 1981 (30 years ago!) to describe Jobs, and it’s dead on. Because let’s face it: the iPhone, at the end of the day, is just a phone. But you wouldn’t know that from the people who waited in line for days to get one. I sympathize with every other technology company out there. They can try (and even succeed) at making better technology than Apple, but they can’t design anything people will shower with as much love. Under Steve Jobs, Apple designed legitimately amazing things, but his greatest skill was making people feel those products were even MORE amazing.

Earlier thoughts on Jobs' legacy here. Reax here.

(Image via Will Adler.)

Before Hitler came around so we could compare people we hated to him, everyone used the biblical Pharoah to accomplish the same thing.