Archimedes’ Hot Tub

During my Nieman year (2010-2011) I was surprised to see that there was not a single Harvard course on the literature of the real – narrative nonfiction. The English department had scores of classes about various aspects of novels, plays, musicals and so on, but nothing on the art form as expressed in long-form nonfiction.

Perhaps the medium is seen as entirely derivative, a lesser art than that practiced by novelists. But I was perplexed, and e-mailed Jill Lepore, who teaches history and literature at Harvard and still manages to write for The New Yorker, this question:

I had meant to ask you why Harvard doesn’t seem to offer courses built around narrative non-fiction. One can take plenty of classes on the great fiction of various eras, on poetry, and on creative nonfiction writing. But there doesn’t seem to be a course on oh, from Riis to Junger or some such thing. This kind of powerful nonfiction story-telling seems uniquely American and certainly since the Modernists has taken the mantle of American story-telling from novelists. That was happening when you and I were in college and it’s only gotten more pronounced. It puzzles me that the novel remains ascendant in the academy.

She graciously wrote back and said it was a fantastic question, and maybe she should develop such a course. She asked me what five books I’d pick.

Five books!?

Goodness. I was stymied in part because I didn’t know where to start. I hadn’t read Riis, or Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens or any of the early giants of journalism. So I started reading.

Late last year, I had lunch with Daniel Gross, a Harvard student I’d met in class and remained in touch with. Daniel asked me if I I’d be interested in teaching a Wintersession class on some aspect of journalism. “How about the beginnings of narrative non-fiction?”  I replied.

That turned into The Roots of Narrative Nonfiction, a course I led last week with 10 undergraduates. We read four works from the first decade of the 20^th century, Tarbell’s History of Standard Oil (the shorter edition, about a quarter of the 900-page original), Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities, DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a reported novel. I picked Sinclair as a stylistic contrast, someone deliberately writing a story that combined reporting with fictional techniques. The other three I picked because of their legendary status and their presence in the top 13 most important works in the history of  20^th century journalism, as established by New York University.

I told the class that I believed these works would ground them in some of the best journalistic writing at the beginning of the 20^th century, and in some of the highest-impact reporting of all time. From these works, I asserted, nonfiction, reporting-driven narratives grew into an art form on par with the novel, and can be studied as such. Why did they all emerge in this period?

Many factors drove the rise of great journalism, not least need. It was a period of huge change in the U.S., one where the national identity was changing. By 1900, America had the highest standard of living in the world, and the biggest economy – producing nearly 24 percent of the world’s industrial output. For all that, three in five Americans still lived in “Our Town,” places with less than 2,500 people, and few had electricity, plumbing or high school educations. Media was, as it had been for hundreds of years, limited to paper. There were 8,000 cars across a population of 76 million. But society was expectant. People were migrating to cities, and thought they would get electricity and plumbing and the like, very soon. [Some facts and figures from the list at this link]
Society is turbulent, our capitalism claw-and-tooth, rapid technological change all around, and a growing middle class plus the promise of better life brought scores of people to the U.S., 1 to 2 million immigrants a year throughout the first decade of the 20^th century. Many of them find disappointment – something like one-third of the people who immigrate to the U.S. end up leaving and going back to their home countries. Before they fail, many of them are involved in strikes and protests against the Trusts, large cartels that dominate American industry. Society is restless, and changing – the U.S. has the world’s highest divorce rate, a scandalous 1 in 7.

Politics filled with bitterness — the Populist movement had crested, and William Jennings Bryan again lost the Presidency to William McKinley, who would be shot a year later, putting Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. Darwinian evolution has gained prominence in social discourse, forty-one years after The Origin of Species was published, and the human genius (or weakness) for analogous reasoning means Darwin’s ideas have mutated into Social Darwinism.

The rise of new technologies, industrial success and evolutionary theory also created a new approach to writing, Modernism. The stark prose of Jack London and other writers break with the Victorian ideals of storytelling – people no longer wrestle against themselves and others, but against unseen forces against which we often have no real chance.

Against this backdrop, we examined our four authors. All of them helped define what America should be. All of them present certain challenges for the modern reader.

Tarbell deliberately did not try to write stories that emulated fiction. She did not consider herself a good enough writer to be a novelist (and at least one of her biographers, Steve Weinberg, author of Taking on the Trust, agrees with her). I drew on Steve’s book, a dual biography of Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller, in teaching. Steve bemoaned that so few people today read Tarbell. There’s a reason why: she’s hard to read. Her prose is stuffed with references to documents and court cases and a bewildering array of people – there is a central villain, but no similar person against him. She’s also writing a Victorian morality play; her prose represents a holdover from the earlier era.

I told the class to remember that she started out writing a three-part series, and was such a sensation that her employer, McClure’s magazine, spun it into its ultimate elephantine 19 parts. I also told them to pay attention to how she built a damning case against a widely admired man who was Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates rolled into one, and did it after 30 years of other people failing to do so. To do so, especially as someone whose family had been affected by Standard Oil’s predatory practices, she needed to adopt a deliberately dispassionate voice. (we also read her character study of Rockefeller, published after her articles had been organized into a best-selling book, and discussed the power of the piece abut how it also undermined her credibility through its personal attacks on Rockefeller). I can only speculate on how she might have done this piece had she been forced to stick to three chapters.

Steffens might have been the Hendrik Hertzberg of his day, but his prose does not flow nearly so well to the modern reader. It’s frustrating – he has a powerful voice, uses sly asides to build rapport with his audience and clearly is a keen observer of politicians and political life. He also appears to have done the reporting he needs to do to spin in dialogue and scenes that would drive us through his narrative. But he almost never uses dialogue and when he does it often feels made up. I told the students to pay special attention to his audacity in telling his readers that politicians are only corrupt when they can get away with it. They reflect us. That kind of bold framing rips apart stereotypes in a way that any journalist should strive for.

Incidentally, both Tarbell and Steffens are publishing their works in McClure’s a magazine juggernaut of the day. I gave the students as background a draft chapter of Dean Starkman’s forthcoming The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, putting McClure’s and its new-fangled investigative journalism in context. Based on their reaction to this chapter, his book is going to be a valuable one to read.

Tarbell and Steffens remain in print only through Dover. Sinclair and DuBois are still in print from multiple publishers. Their writing is a big reason why.
Upton Sinclair sets out to write a novel based on seven weeks of immersion reporting – he embedded himself in Chicago’s Stockyards, working in the factories there. His writing moves us, not from his skill as much as the power of his reporting. The class didn’t think it agreed with me that the main character, Jurgis Rudkus, represents an idealized pre-Socialist version of Sinclair, but they found him compelling at the start. Sinclair loses his authority, his way, and our interest as he gets further from his reporting. It’s gripping work for 15 chapters, but then descends into a common serialized soap opera for the next 17 or so, and in the last four becomes a kind of Socialist utopian propaganda tract. A writer with the gifts of Fitzgerald or Nabokov can be read simply for the beauty of their prose; Sinclair could not. His work depended on his reporting. He complained that he aimed for people’s hearts and hit them in their stomachs. Some of it had to do with what he reported, and what he couldn’t. Some of it had to do with his ultimate aim — people’s heads. It gave us a powerful lesson in the value of reporting, no matter what genre you work in.

W.E.B. DuBois uses Biblical references and classical allusions in a way that meant something to readers of his day but is lost on modern readers. Otherwise, he is surprisingly modern. He has a clear story arc. He uses a variety of narrative techniques, including scenes, analysis, vignettes, and even allegory. He combines it all to create a compelling narrative. He, of the four authors we examined, breaks the mold of what came before, and points the way to where nonfiction is going. Thus I have the beginnings of an answer for Jill Lepore: start with DuBois.

Though they don’t always use them, the elements of modern immersive reporting exist in all four of these works. These writers point the way towards the richly detailed, wildly varied approaches to nonfiction narrative we are blessed with today.

A coda: I told the class that while America on the surface looks very different than it did in 1900, similar forces are at play. They are living through massive technological change. Where our ancestors looked forward to electricity, plumbing and cars, we will soon have our DNA in our wallets, micro-arrays that will automatically balance our brain chemistry for optimal performance in school and work and houses that will combine simple robots and digital technology to provide us with residential servants. We also have our maverick political ideology, not Populism driven from the heartlands but a techno-determinist Libertarianism that comes from secondary cities on the coasts.

Perhaps these students will help define our new America, in stories that push the boundaries of reported narrative.

I’m leading a dialogue on the roots of nonfiction narrative as a Harvard “Wintersession” class (Wintersession being a series of mostly for-fun classes that Harvard and MIT organize during the long break between end of the Fall Semester in December and beginning of the Spring term at the end of January). We’re discussing four early examples of narrative journalism — The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. DuBois, The Shame of the Cities, by Lincoln Steffens, The History of the Standard Oil Company, by Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a reported novel.

Tarbell was a great journalist and what she did in putting together her pieces on Standard Oil is nothing short of a tour de force of reporting. Her writing could be very good, but she is a throwback in the way she covered Standard Oil. It’s like reading a Victorian morality tale, one with a clear villain but not much else. She seems to almost deliberately not use narrative techniques in these stories, though she used them in other stories, and even in her character sketch of Rockefeller, publishing in McClure’s after her book came out.  That lack of narrative provides a big reason why the full History is not in print, despite the undeniable impact of her work.
Unlike Tarbell, DuBois employed a lot of the elements of fiction in his journalism; he’s surprisingly modern in his style and in the way he structures pieces. You could almost hear the words ringing in your ears, generally the sign of a good writer. Sadly, some of his stories could probably still be reported today (20 years ago I was looking at things in Louisiana that could have come out of DuBois’s book). It was audacious at the time to argue that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line;” most whites probably didn’t see it as a problem at all. But he carries it off throughout his text.

Steffens no less audacious for saying that corruption in politics is not the fault of the politicians, it’s the fault of the people. He is not, however, as interesting to read as DuBois. Steffens has a sly voice and writes with authority, but his use of dialogue, scenes, description and even basic facts does not measure up to modern narrative writing. Reading him is like running into Montaigne on the city desk.

Sinclair’s reported novel is like three books in one. The first 15 chapters are built on his immersive stint in the packing factories. The writing is pretty good and while Jurgis Rudkus is not a deeply drawn character, he is sympathetic and believable. Most of this section could be reported and written as actual non-fiction, and indeed was received that way, though Jurgis does not exist. (A digression: I believe Sinclair created Jurgis in the stockyard as an idealized version of himself before socialism.) The second part of the novel, Jurgis’s decline and shift into the corrupt politics of Chicago, remains believable, though it feels like it was reported less from observation than from reading Steffens and other accounts of the day. The third part of the novel is a socialist Utopia based on not much more than Sinclair’s own beliefs. It can’t be reported because it doesn’t exist, and the book’s ending suffers badly for it. Worst of all, Jurgis basically disappears. Most of the other characters sound like Sinclair giving speeches (he uses an actual speech he gave as his climax). I told the students they should try to avoid Sinclair’s approach here, though he fell into a common trap: not knowing what your ending is going to be.

Ran across this post-Christmas column Why Most Men Aren’t Man enough to Handle Web Porn,”
by the social philosopher Alain de Botton. He’s really saying men can’t handle too much freedom. We are not designed to be post-modern relativists. It’s fine for Sartre and Derrida, maybe, but not for Tom, Dick or Harry. We can’t transcend our biology, but technology can. Or, as he puts it,

A largely unwitting alliance made up of Cisco, Del, Oracle Microsoft and thousands of pornographic providers have now found a way of exploiting a design flaw in the male gender. A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities.

Religion could help, since he calls it the only force in society that remains suspicious of sex. But secular society won’t abide adopting religious principles (an ongoing theme of de Botton, an atheist who nonetheless mourns the waning of religion). He says that “the secular world has no problems with bikinis and sexual provocations of all kinds, because among other reasons it does not believe that sexuality and beauty have the potential to exert momentous power over us.”

Has he watched a beer commercial in the last 30 years, or walked by a magazine stand? Sex is everywhere, because of its commercial power. Societal norms forced religious ideals to cede authority over economic behavior to a naive agent-less market over the course of the last 300 years, and so too with sexual mores. Cliche though it be, sex sells. It colors a good deal of economic behavior for men and women. Listen to Tom Lehrer reveling in it in his 1965 song Smut. Companies default to sexual messages in their marketing because it’s a lowest-common denominator.

This clearly is not a new problem. Lots of other things also overwhelm the brain; book authors and screenwriters use cliffhangers to keep us reading and watching; game designers want to leverage the same brain receptors as addictive drugs, to keep us playing.

Sex has plenty of competition for the minds of men. Pray for us…

Nieman Storyboard graciously allowed me to write about why I like Andrew Corsello’s “The Wronged Man.” I read this story years ago, and it shook me. I continue to think about that story and the mockery of justice it exposed.

Here’s what I wrote. Here’s my interview with Corsello about writing the piece.

Maybe some day I’ll write something half as good, and meaningful.

I sometimes throw parts of the newspaper at my kids (using the print version, not the tablet version) to see what happens. If it’s just a story, they tend not to look at it too closely. But lately the B section of the Boston Globe has featured eye-popping photographs, and once they see those, they want to read the story. Recently they were fascinated by pieces on a record-breaking pumpkin. They read the first piece, raising the possibility of a record, and then devoured the piece covering the prize itself. Today they were both fascinated by this piece about a man’s record-breaking biceps.

They read the jump page and everything. These pieces form part of their conversations for the day. They’ll bring up details from the story later in the day, or ask me what I think about them (cute that they think of me still as some kind of expert). Now I need to show them the pieces on the tablet and see if they find them as gripping. Or maybe I should set up a Billy Baker feed, since all three of these stories were his work.
Would they prefer the newspaper version of the story to seeing this on YouTube?

By chance have read two novels lately that deal with the role of faith and the church in American life.  The oldest is Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. His seminal character is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a character whose very name implies he’s going to be used to take the measure of something fundamental. One thing he measures is the church and its meaning in our life.  He believes in God, but not church orthodoxy. As his mother-in-law says to Eccles, the Episcopalian priest who ministers to her and to Harry, “Well if the world is going to be full of Harry Angstroms how much longer do you think they’ll need your church?”
Indeed, Rabbit seems to represent the unfettered pursuit of self-interest, and there’s nothing economic about his interests. Rabbit is a completely impulsive man who follows his feelings. Women seem to love him and hate him both. Faith and the church cannot restrain him from his worst impulses. Simultaneously, at his best he seems to transcend the church. (Perhaps he’s a prophet.) He certainly presages citizens who couldn’t care less about the self-denial demanded by church orthodoxy. The tension between those who think the church worth noting and those who couldn’t care less pervades Updike’s novel.

Does that tension’s outcome lead directly to E.L. Doctorow’s City of God? Published 40 years after Updike published Rabbit, Run, Doctorow’s book is more directly dour about Christianity. His city of God is New York, not Updike’s fictionalized Brewster, fifth-largest city in Pennsylvania. New York may be the City of God, but city of the church? Not really. The church matters little, it’s a kind of amusing anachronism where clever people engage in philosophical debates and occasionally in jests at the dried husk of their dying denominations, as highlighted by the sparsely attended congregations we see. It’s entertainment, seeing how far we can go to pull one over on those who show up in the pews, expecting something real. In the end, though, something real does get discerned.

Both books contain beautiful writing; Updike’s ranks with the best novels I’ve read in years (Doctorow’s narrative shifts perspectives in a way that means I’ll have to read it again to really appreciate it). Both stiff-arm Episcopalianism. Both grapple with faith as a force that matters, and try to answer “but how?”

The hacker as juvenile delinquent is an old meme. Hackers today are organized criminals, terrorists, government-sponsored agents of destruction. So it’s almost refreshing to read a piece where a hacker is just a bored teenager who doesn’t fit into the system. Almost refreshing because of course, he breaks things, or more specifically, into things.

“Cosmo,” the subject of this Wired piece, is quite good at breaking into people’s online accounts. He’s not a technical whiz – he’s a social hacker, able to talk people at important technology companies into doing things like changing passwords on accounts, so his friends can take them over and wreck lives. In fact, Cosmo happened to help wreck the life of the article’s author.

How much damage can today’s juvenile delinquent hackers do?

With his group, UGNazi (short for “underground nazi” and pronounced “you-gee” not “uhg”), Cosmo took part in some of the most notorious hacks of the year. Throughout the winter and spring, they DDoS’ed all manner of government and financial sites, including NASDAQ, ca.gov, and CIA.gov, which they took down for a matter of hours in April. They bypassed Google two step, hijacked 4chan’s DNS and redirected it to their own Twitter feed, and repeatedly posted Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s address and Social Security number online. After breaking into one billing agency using social-engineering techniques this past May, they proceeded to dump some 500,000 credit card numbers online. Cosmo was the social engineer for the crew, a specialist in talking his way past security barriers. His arsenal of tricks held clever-yet-idiot-proof ways of getting into accounts on Amazon, Apple, AOL, PayPal, Best Buy, Buy.com, Live.com (think: Hotmail, Outlook, Xbox) and more. He can hijack phone numbers from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and your local telco.

Wired’s striving for cred means it liberally sprinkles in hacker jargon. Those who don’t make it their business to keep up with the tech crowd will have to sneak off to look up “lulz” (laughs) and other hacker terms (don’t know DDoS means an attack that prevents an Internet service provider from providing service? Tough). But readers should push through – it’s eye-opening to see what hackers can do to get at our data. Coincidentally, the most famous social hacker of all, Kevin Mitnick, has a new autobiography out. His exploits, while impressive, were far less destructive to random individuals. But there was much less data online when Mitnick was working, and the Internet was not yet a consumer medium.

Things are different now. Cosmo’s story provides an inadvertent call-to-arms to consumers and businesses: take ownership of your data. At a minimum, find out what Netflix, Amazon and your online bank do to protect your passwords from the likes of Cosmo.

Because while Cosmo seems to sincerely regret that he’s caused harm to the writer and others, the rest of his crew do not. There’s a strain of nihilism that runs through modern hacking, with none of the noble detachment of Turgenev’s seminal nihilist Bazarov.

Cosmo’s gang shares more with certain Batman villains – they just like to make things burn. Just for lulz…

Apple seems to have a worm inside it. At least, that’s the perception. It happens to any daring darling innovator. At some point, they do something that exposes them as just another craven rentseeker, sucking profits out of the market like a capitalist leech. IBM had it in the 1970s, Microsoft had it after Windows 95 (and Internet Explorer), Google’s having it now over fraudulent ads. Apple’s problem is two-fold: it claims it can’t build things in the U.S., and those companies that build for it abuse their workers, as the New York Times reported. One of the best anecdotes in the Times piece involved a last-minute change Apple wanted for the iPhone, to get rid of the plastic screen it was designed with and replace it with glass.

As the Times put it:

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Say what you want about newspapers, but the NYT piece clearly matters. In just a few days, Apple’s gone from being the company for the rest of us to being on top of the 1 percent. It didn’t help that the head of Foxconn, Apple’s major supplier of iPhones and other products (the company that employed the slave-driver foreman), chose the same weekend to call his workers “animals.” But the Foxconn gaffe was just a bit of grease for the skids. Today a search on Google News reveals more than 2,000 articles about Apple’s image problem. Erik Sherman in his column takes this damning shot at Apple:

However, the screen swap example reveals something else even more stunning. What company changes a major design at the last minute? That betrays a serious lack of managerial foresight and planning. In other words, the real reason Apple operates in China is so it can have a captive workforce in what amounts to the high-tech equivalent of a company mining town. Employees are supposed to be on-call at any hour, while earning a pittance, to make up for Apple’s mistakes.

Of course, Apple just posted spectacular financial results. And for all the noise, the Daily Beast apparently could only find 18 Twitter users giving up Apple.  I don’t have an iPhone, but I am typing this on a MacBook Pro, sitting next to it is my iPad, and off in the kitchen on the table radio is my iPod Touch. I feel uncomfortable about all these Apple products. But will I switch? Large numbers of people profess to hate Microsoft, but it remains incredibly profitable. I still have and use a Windows computer. I have an XBox Kinect, too. It is truly cool, but that doesn’t make Microsoft cool, as this Bloomberg BusinessWeek article shows.

I hope Apple gets its act together, and stops behaving like the Durham Company in “The Jungle.” But its Cool Kid  days are over. All that’s left now are profits.

My first freelance piece of the New Year, Why science is fragile (it’s in the Boston Globe Ideas section and may demand a subscription fee). I talked with Bob McCauley, a pioneer in the scientific study of religion, about his new book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. It’s still hard for me to believe that science is in danger, but I do get that it is a cognitive challenge.

Started my morning in bed, finishing a galley copy of Mr g,, Alan Lightman’s next novel, about the creation. Lightman’s creator is not so creative as Milton’s, so vindictive as Dante’s nor so cruel as Melville’s. Lightman’s devil is sleek and backstabbing, but in some ways more engaged in the universe and more creative than Mr g himself. Lightman is of course a much better cosmologist than his forbears, and emotionally profound in his own way. Meaning comes from the atoms, inadvertently. I’ll be mulling this book for a while.

Palantir is a contradiction of a company: started by a diehard libertarian in order to sell software to governments that has the potential to undermine civil liberties, enticing bright engineers in Silicon Valley to take jobs that lack large financial returns, uses a demo and anonymous sources to highlight its potential. still, an interesting read in Business Week: Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.

Working my way through Best American Magazine Writing 2010. The latest update to the series reminds us just how good non-fiction writing can be. This morning was a feature writing finalist, Evan Ratliff’s Vanish, an engrossing, suspenseful story of his effort to disappear for a month. See also this: How We Caught Missing Wired Writer Evan Ratliff