So Long, Slate; It’s Been Real

My time at Slate officially ended at the close of the workday Friday, so that’s the curtain on two-and-a-half years as a web developer for what I think is the best magazine on the web.

It sounds embellished, but before I left TIME I used to routinely tell the editors that the site should work to be “more like Slate,” meaning TIME.com needed to do less news-chasing and more personality-based news analysis. Magazines are rarely going to beat all the wire services, newspapers and bloggers to the punch, so the best way to distinguish a site as a commentary outlet is by letting the writers be themselves and by not being afraid to stick a neck out to get the point across. Maybe two out of every seven people I talk to know of Slate, but those two are inevitably die-hard fans who ask me what particular Slate writers are like in real life. In this era of fragmented audience, that weirdly high level of interest is just what you want for your site.

As much as it was great working at Slate in the publication-wide sense, on an individual level I’m ready to move on after this period of strictly technological work. Working solely in web development just isn’t where my main interests lie. A well-functioning piece of code is a linguistic treat — it has the ability to convey exactly the commands and results that you want within a delimited set of communications, and being that linguistic skillz are how I roll, I’m all about it. But after so much time building pieces of the site, I miss the variety and sense of direction that comes from a more multidisciplinary job — I want to use not only my technology skills, but my journalism knowledge, my sense of creativity and my ability to play a bigger role in direction and strategy. That said, the web-technology work will be invaluable along the way, and technology got my foot in the Slate door in the first place. So while it’s not entirely what I want to do with my career, big ups nonetheless to web technology.

Slate is opinionated and intellectual, and so too are the people who fill the pages. As a result, it’s a great workplace where everyone throws ideas back and forth to pick out the best ones. I really will miss working there, but sometime in the future I hope I get the chance to work with the site again.

Meantime, I’m getting my vacation on for a week. After that, it’s on to Phase Michigan in just a short while. Peace out until then.

A Too-Serious Hipster Takedown

From AdBusters, my senior-year Print Media Design professor’s favorite publication:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

While the working-class symbol usurpation thing always galled me, I don’t think calling these goofs symbolic of “the end of Western civilization” is really valid. Hipsters have always been about cooler-than-thou meaninglessness for socializing’s sake. If you hold people like that out as the political vanguard of a generation, of course things are going to seem hopeless. In the real world, that guy on Rivington with the tilted Fidel Castro hat is too busy organizing the Of Montreal after-party to want to be a spokesman for social change, nor should he be seen as one.

So yeah, hipsters = not worth that much intellectual dissection.

Frank Rich, Chill Out A Little

It’s not even August yet, broseph. Certainly not yet time to head into breathless polemic territory, no matter whom you want to win.

Your Write, Liberel Papers Never Get They’re Facts Strait

Today I got a letter asking me to subscribe to the Washington Times newspaper, the Rev. Sun-Myung Moon-backed conservative oracle. I don’t know how I got on their mailing list, as I’m the type (both actual and demographic) who’s unlikely to respond positively to a printed quote from Rush Limbaugh that “The Washington Times is a paper I can’t do without.” But the whole thing provided some unexpected fun.

First the letter noted how the liberal media doesn’t care to report the real news that affects people like me, and that the New York Times now has a section of the paper devoted entirely to corrections. (Don’t all newspapers have this? “Section” in this case just means, “A few paragraphs on the back of page one like newspapers have done for decades.”) But the stones were hurled powerfully out of the glass house when the same letter disparaged — not once, not twice, but thrice — the terrorist-loving platitudes of one “Barrack [sic] Obama”.

Sadly for the consumer marketing team at Washington Times, they can confuse the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with military housing all they want and it won’t make much of a difference in my subscription status. After all, the liberal media thing has been working out pretty well for me.

Dudes, Why So Much Debt?

The Wife and I had a good discussion today sparked by Sunday’s first piece in the New York Times series on debt in America. (And thanks to J Frog for sending me that way today.)

I did learn a nice history of the lending industry from the article, in particular the industry’s shift in focus from demanding repayment to collecting fee-based income off of ever-rolling debt. While the credit-card industry, and certainly the mortgage industry of the past few years, often embodies the term “predatory capitalism”, it does seem that the article shifted too much of the onus for America’s debt problem away from the public. This is similar to media outlets who generally avoid putting any blame on the voting public for America’s political messes, for obvious business reasons. (What audience wants to be told that it’s the proverbial box of dull tacks? I prefer my mental tack sharp, thanks.)

Maybe I’m too harsh, though, because the writers and editors might have been making a point on the sly about the general public by choosing the subject that they did. Ms. McLeod — no relation to Connor, who has a far better repayment cycle with which to work — really makes one unfortunate (read: not well-thought-out) decision after another. From spending her already debt-addled medical recovery cruising QVC, to adding her 20-year-old son onto her second home-refinancing and ruining his credit too, I really don’t understand what made her do what she did.

So that raises the question: What really has made debt-laden ‘Mercans turn away from the admirable saving habits of back in the not-that-far-off day? Why is “I gotta have it” such a seemingly more powerful motivator across society now than it was then? This was the topic of conversation between The Wife and me. We came to one important conclusion that’s both seemingly unrelated but not that surprising: television.

The modern debt cycle really started to germinate at about the time the TV-raised Boomer generation was earning enough money to buy homes, sign up for credit cards and pop out Millennials like your gracious host. Boomers had grown up with TV, which based on its sheer volume of audio and visual stimulation was inevitably packed full of product pitches and brand names. Sure, their parents — the Greatests — were watching TV too, but the Depression experience burned the saving ethic into their parents’ heads for life. Greatests learned back then to do things like wearing the same six velour jumpsuits for 30 years. (Which is smart — over time this actually becomes cool, what with the roundabout cycle of retro hipness.)

Boomers weren’t about to wear velour jumpsuits; velour is too hot in summer, and after a childhood of American prosperity and the enveloping nature of TV advertising, they had to get that fine narrow-lapel suit to go with the Commodore 64 for the kids. Advertisers, too, were well-aware of just how good a job TV had done to implant the “buy stuff” message into America’s collective mind. Over time they shifted from making their products attractive to making access to their products a moral right — “You deserve a break today” and “Live richly”, not just “Our McNuggets taste totally rad” and “Hey, peep out this low interest rate.” This newly created sense of entitlement grew strong until too many people didn’t bother to use their better instincts, and the things they felt they needed encompassed even luxury goods that were previously — and still probably should be — considered impractical on the average income. Cue up many of my generational peeps growing up in this environment, who should nonetheless know better than to spend that percentage allotted for savings on Manhattan rent and cosmopolitans, and the cycle continues. (Also, thank you, Mom and Dad, for teaching me how to save cash and how to avoid becoming a spoiled jagoff.)

In conclusion, if we didn’t have TV, we might not have a subprime mortgage crisis and government bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The end.

Obama’s Biggest Trip Gain: Quality Stock Footage for Fall

“Does this make me look West Wing?”

The hot-spot, Central Command phase of Barack Obama’s foreign-policy tour is winding down, and so far he seems to have hit all the right political notes. Hooping it up was a particularly swift move, but even more fortunate was the fact that Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki came right out and supported a timetable for withdrawal nearly in line with Obama’s 16-month plan. There’s plenty to the argument against a timetable and the realpolitik strategic importance of Iraq over Afghanistan, particularly the fact that the Iraqi Sunnis don’t support a timetable, but from a political point-scoring perspective that’s a little irrelevant. Arguments from McCain or Bush against an American-favored Iraqi leader’s statements about what’s best for his own country are now going to face criticisms of tone-deafness and arrogance.

I don’t envy anyone making the Israel / Palestinian political trip, but I think the best Obama can hope for is to play perhaps the only role that America can play towards Israel to improve the situation: that of the friend who takes the keys when someone’s too wasted to realize he’s going to mess himself up if he keeps going.

But to bring things back to the title: it’s still summertime, the public and the media have long since put the blinders on for Iraq and Afghanistan, and most voters are on a break until the real campaign starts with the fall. Obama managed to score himself plenty of presidential-looking video filler for newscasts about his foreign-policy experience this fall, and that likely counts for more with the TV-influenced voting public than anything else on this trip.

Pointing Out David Addington

John Yoo got the bulk of the negative publicity for his torture memo, but I’ve read many times that David Addington has been the real advocate for scrapping the rule of law in the Bush Administration. This Bob Herbert column on Addington makes that point better than I can.

Is The Internet Rewiring My Brain?

As someone who once spent three weeks as a copy-edit intern, and thus as someone highly qualified to pass judgment on any copy-editing decision ever made, the following are my issues with the Atlantic headline “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

1. The web is much bigger than Google;
2. While it is mentioned several times, the article is not about Google itself;
3. “Stupid” is a value judgment, and thus an inaccurate headline for an article that instead focuses mostly on the value-neutral, meta-thought-process changes wrought by the web.

On to the substance of Nicholas Carr’s piece: some yes, and also no.

I was reading a response to the article that notes how few of the piece’s critics will cop to having had a, “Hey, that’s cool, I’ll read this thing I found … oh wait, that looks cooler … what was I originally reading again?” experience. I will more than cop to that, as it happens to me almost every day. In one hour today I bounced between Newsweek, The A.V. Club, Rotten Tomatoes and several friends’ sites, to the point that it took me an average of 20 minutes to get through each article that would have taken five minutes without the distraction of the others. So yes, I do an incredibly greater amount of skimming online than I would in print.

But–always a but. Skimming online doesn’t mean I avoid skimming the newspaper, or even skimming the library. Back in the day I used to sit in this great, undisturbed backroom at the Carnegie Library picking out books on World War I or II, leafing through each one until a passage caught my eye and then putting the book back before moving on to another. (Lest you worry too much for my back-in-the-day social life, I did do plenty of things that didn’t entail sitting alone in libraries. But then I do have a strong nerd side, so it wasn’t an insignificant amount of reading.) The reality is that briefly glancing over things to find the meaty parts didn’t come along with the web.

And on the book tip, I think this paragraph is especially strange:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

I do appreciate the link to Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0, which is right up my professional alley and which I hadn’t read before. But really, no more books and in-depth tomes? In the past two weeks I made it through Generation Kill and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I can safely say that my experience of each was in no way harmed by my Internet reading habits. A book is just a different experience: when I want wide-ranging and cursory, I’ll read online. (I’d say this brief familiarity with so many topics is more useful in a hugely varietal world than knowing just a few topics very well.) When I do want that informed look at just one topic, I pick up a book. I don’t think a failure to pick up a book is all that widespread among people who are reading a lot otherwise online; so many of the cultural touchstones for intelligent online readers of, say, The Atlantic continue to come from books. If you’re hung up on the printed format, we now have Kindle to bring books up to speed with other electronic publishing.

So yes, the web is restructuring how we consume media, and probably even restructuring our thought processes. It doesn’t mean older formats are going to be erased and crowded out. I think Carr makes this point himself in the last few paragraphs when he talks about the advent of writing, and of the printing press. Oral communication didn’t die with writing, nor will in-depth thought on a single topic die with the web.

The more forms of information that come along, the better.

State of the Summer

Yo all.

It’s been a mostly post-free summer for this website, but life is good right now, so I’ve been living it instead of blogging it.

It’s just a few short weeks now until I quit my job, go on a quick vacation and then move up to Ann Arbor for b-school. While going to Michigan is bound to be fun and rewarding, at the moment it feels sad as an indicator that the summer situation will come to an end. A quick list of just what will be ending:

• I work from home in Chicago, giving me an extra two hours of the day that would have otherwise been spent commuting. Sure, I miss the social interaction of the office and the chance to catch up on my train-bound reading, but dropping my daily commute down to the 22 seconds it takes to roll out of bed and walk down to my computer is a phat tradeoff. Admittedly it has had some deleterious effects on personal grooming, but funk doesn’t travel through phone lines.
• The Wife is busy studying for the bar, but the plus side of that is that she doesn’t have classes (except recently ended half-day BarBri lectures) so we get all day to be the obnoxious married couple that enjoys each other’s company. And I do usually shower at her prompting. Word.
• I have a pile of friends living here the likes of which I haven’t had since being in New York. Oddly enough, several of those friends have moved here too. Flip-cup and late-night taco stands just weren’t the same without the homies.
• Our condo is totally sweet-ass. That’s really the only compound adjective to describe it.
• Chicago. Summer. It’s the bomb. This summer has featured July 4th fireworks from the 70th floor of the Sears Tower, running along the lake, getting my lift on again, the discovery of my all-time favorite barbershop, relatively cool weather, plenty of socializing, and madd Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago dogs.

Ann Arbor right now represents the following: not getting paid to work in my pajamas, a wife living 250 miles away, confusion over football loyalties, and a paucity of Italian beef. That’s overly harsh and I really do think it’s going to be lots of fun, plus I hear Zingerman’s sandwiches are quite tasty, but UMich won’t be fun the same way that this summer has been.

They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I’m well aware that I have a shitload and I sure as hell am enjoying it. Here’s hoping the rest of you peeps are enjoying yours as well.

New McCain Ad: “Love”

Maybe it’s a Pennsylvania thing, but I’ve started to see presidential campaign commercials back here in Pittsburgh. This one has a funny subtext:

“John McCain was a war hero. But there was something even more important than that: John McCain was not a hippie.”

“Cut His Nuts Off”

I’m picking up a hint of jealousy here.

You’d think a guy who did so much to allow this nomination to happen would have saved the personal stuff for the ride home.

Esquire’s 75 Things To Do

My new copy of Esquire arrived today, featuring a list of 75 things every man should do by Tom Chiarella. (Sadly there’s no online link yet.) This is a sequel, the previous list being 75 skills every man should master. I notice this month’s version got a big fold-out ad placement from Patron, and on the heels of the previous list it’s one of those nice edit specials that practically sells itself to advertisers. In this day and age of the media industry, it’s reassuring to see nearly any ad buy, much less a foldout.

While there are many good entries, and by that I mean several that I’ve done, this list is at times a bit too cosmopolitan for my taste — eat mussels in Bruges? Live in a hotel suite for a week? I don’t think it takes riches to achieve a great list of worthwhile accomplishments. Here are my addenda:

• Buy a home. Care and ownership is a surprisingly humbling experience.
• Read from the Western canon. Going back and hitting those high-school requirements you missed really is worth it.
• Have more than one bad-date story. Mine are the time that I was three hours late, bombed the execution, gave up on things completely, then later found out I should have called anyway because the girl was disappointed that she never heard from me; and the time a date of mine got drunk and started heckling the comedians at the stand-up club. You need a good supply of these for when you’re married and still at a party with single people.
• Own a pet. Good preparation for kids. Plus, fun.
• Gain a firsthand memory of just why violence is bad. Get beat up, beat someone and feel guilty, or just watch a fight and be sickened by it — it’s far too easy to be a cheerleader when you’re far away.
• Swim in a natural body of water. Fewer people do this than we’d think.
• Join a national organization. The military is a great one, but so are the Sierra Club, PADI and the Elks Lodge.
• Go to a city council meeting. The business of altering people’s lives can be surprisingly mundane.
• Listen to an old guy’s stories. That’ll be you someday wishing it mattered just as much to someone else.
• Put one of your stories in writing, even if you’re the only one who rereads it. Nothing like the written word to imbue meaning.

Steelers: At Least the Other Guy Is Pittsburgh Too

I’m reserving judgment on how I feel about this potential Steelers sale until I know more. But whoa, big changes potentially ahead.

Why Obama Is Breaking Right

This Frank Rich piece from the NY Times makes a good point about the listlessness that seems to have infected the Presidential campaign in the past month or so. Most of that is attributable to the summer vacations drawing away the attention of both the press and the media audience, but it’s true that there hasn’t been a lot of substance recently. So why though does the Obama campaign move away from all that fun audacity of hope stuff?

Thing is, Obama and his campaign have the calculation down: he isn’t going to win the election by appealing to Frank Rich, and no matter how much his changed policies on Iraq and public-campaign financing make his original fans angry, they aren’t going to matter much to the rest of the electorate that has tuned things out until the fall and didn’t agree with the lefty positions on those issues in the first place. He can also save the exciting rhetoric for the time that the spotlight’s turned back on. It’s cynical, but Obama surely won’t lose left-leaning voters in the general election — they’re going to sit this one out after what happened in 2000 and 2004? — and can only potentially gain middle-ground voters by moving that way. Sure, it’s inconsistent, but sometimes you gotta know who you can afford to piss off, and that’s usually the party base.

Happy 232nd

Here’s to January 20, 2009.