Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Different remains divisive, or at least remarkable, even in East Coast Blue states like New Jersey. For mixed family, old racial tensions remain part of life shows that people who cross racial lines to marry will run into unpleasant remarks and stares, as well as teasing that is meant to be good-natured but can be awkward.

The accompanying slide show includes a powerful photo of the family walking down a New Jersey boardwalk enjoying the sun, while a man stares at them (the photo does lack clarity — one hopes that the picture was taken because the man is staring so openly, and the photographer snapped it. But it could be that he’s staring because a photographer is taking pictures of them). The diversity in this woman’s family came through wonderfully in the accompanying Web video.

Yet the worst episodes in the piece happened a generation ago, to the parents of the mixed-race mom in the story. And it notes that on contemporary college campuses and in cities, young people are far less likely to care. Honestly, the mom in the story has run into far more flak than my family has, either in California or here in Massachusetts. Not that we haven’t heard some things, from crass remarks and disbelief (one of our boys had blue-ish eyes as a baby) to curiosity. But in Millis I was able to write this piece on race, Seeing Family in Black and White.  And now that we live in Cambridge, there is so much diversity in their school and at the bus stop and on the soccer field that I forget my kids are “different.” Different from what?
Even our church is multicultural, though church remains a place where Americans tend to separate. Weird, given how the Holy Spirit worked in Acts.

This Business Week article on Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos, entitled ‘The Omnivore’ in the print edition and ‘Amazon, the Company that Ate the World’ online offers a great testament to thorough and in-depth reporting, and the space to run it (too used to skimming on line, I had to sit down with the magazine to read it through this a.m.). You see Bezos and his driven, loopy, fun, crass self. There’s enough space and good detail that we see Amazon’s impact on many markets, richly detailed vignettes about the creation of the Kindle and the new Kindle Fire (Bezos comes off looking like Steve Jobs, an obvious reason why Amazon gave the access it did), and the deleterious effect of bigness on communities and entire states. We also have space to see Amazon’s stumblings, though there could have been more focus on that (the A9 search engine is still around? did anybody note that Amazon’s services customers also become targets — Borders, Netflix). It even reminds us that local reporting really matters — it was the Allentown Morning Call that exposed Amazon’s Dickensian operational practices in its local warehouse (sadly, Business Week seems to have asked only about the lack of air conditioning, not Amazon’s reported stringing along of temporary workers). Innovation rarely means pure progress.
Other interesting nuggets from this piece: It makes the argument that the new Kindle Fire “crystallizes the difference between Apple, which tends to keep prices (and profit margins) high, and Amazon, which likes to start low and drive lower in an effort to knee-cap the competition,” reminding me of articles about Wal-Mart just a few years ago. It also points to Amazon as the reason that Borders is out of business, Best Buy is shrinking store size and Wal-Mart has seen same-store sales drop for nine straight quarters. Good work by Brad Stone, ex NYT.
Another long and beautiful piece I’m reading in a magazine: The Birth of Religion, in National Geographic, by Charles Mann. Interesting argument for religion as pre-dating farming, but I’m not sure it’s the first. I remember listening to Colin Renfrew talking about sites in Eastern Europe that I think were also nomad burial sites and showed all the signs of religious practice. I’ll have to go look that up. The NatGeo article does make a good case for why its site makes Stonehenge look simple.

Enjoyed this piece on Richard Dawkins, A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy, by Michael Powell. Powell’s piece reminds us that Dawkins was never much of a scientist, but was a terrific synthesizer, and that we need synthesizers like Dawkins to create the path for new, complex ideas.

It also shows how Dawkins can be an extremist in some regards, and reasonable and engaging on others. Powell even manages to get Dawkins to say something not negative about Simon Conway Morris, who believes in God perhaps as passionately as Dawkins does not.

The piece includes a useful video interview about Dawkins moving to atheism. He’s no more convincing than Francis Collins on becoming a believer. I suppose that’s just me.

Tucked in my mailbox the other day was an article on An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer. It looked at a radical new experimental use of genetically altered T-Cells to fight leukemia, done by doctors at the University of Pennsylvania’s cancer center.

There were only three patients, but the treatment worked for all three (one of them is in only partial remission). It was exciting to see this innovation, and sobering to note that the article reports Zeligh Eshhar’s initial work on genetically altering T-cells took place in the 1980s.

Real innovation creeps. Perhaps this radical cancer intervention will be a step towards iterative innovation, which can move much faster.

Two of my fellow Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellows were in the New York Times. One, Juliet Eilperin, had her book “Demon Fish” reviewed by the other, Sandy Blakeslee. It’s a clever review that gets at the heart of yet another human-driven problem: sharks are disappearing at our hands. A lot of the reason is shark-fin soup, though shark fins are tasteless. There’s also the fear factor, that sharks sometimes kill swimmers, even though it happens that Christmas tree ornaments are more dangerous than sharks.

You might think religion is gone from the mainstream arts. But Everett Hamner posts a list of the 10 best books of religion in American literature in the first decade of the century, and it seems to be a good one. I note that it does not include Thomas Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” though Pynchon always challenges us to think about religion in the modern world. Maybe they just couldn’t wade through it, or, like me, find the narrator off-putting (a problem in a 1,000-page novel).
I ran across this post in Christian Century, which highlighted it as a list of best religiously-themed fiction of the first decade of the century.

With the U.S. stock market acting like the malleable oracle we forget it is, a few reads on economic behavior I found useful.

Buffett tells it like it is. Will Congress actually listen?
Don Peck’s book excerpt in The Atlantic suggests not (has to be the least possessing lead I’ve seen in a major publication in some time, but grit your teeth and keep reading — it gets more interesting).
Nouriel Roubini proclaims that capitalism is dead. Why he’s invoking Marx instead of Schumpeter one can only guess.

Looking for a digital version of Ben Hecht’s “The Pig” to share with my students, I ran across this collection of old school links for new school journalists. I like that instead of ‘five things digital journalists must learn’ he calls it 130 years of must-read stories for digital journalists.

Renee Loth’s scathing dismissal of efforts by corporate leaders to repatriate overseas profits at greatly reduced tax rates (let’s not open the door to corporate tax-dodging)  caught my attention this morning. She may be overly dismissive of giving a tax break to companies (even at 5.25 percent, many of them will be paying more in taxes than is typical on income — see here for 2008 –which is not to say companies don’t pay taxes — see Business Week and Forbes). But it looks disingenuous for corporate leaders to argue that increased tax revenues will create more jobs. The financial blog Seeking Alpha notes that the premise comes from the thin hope that if people have more money, they’ll buy more things, increasing demand. To wit:

The idea behind tax strategy is not exactly to create or protect jobs, but to increase aggregate demand, i.e., GDP growth, which is what would cause employers to start hiring again. In the case of this tax compromise,[written in December 2010, when the Bush-era tax cuts, and unemployment benefits, were extended] the only aspects of it that seem likely to increase aggregate demand are the reduction in the employee side of the payroll tax and the accelerated depreciation benefit. The biggest slug of it, maintaining the current income tax rates, doesn’t increase aggregate demand at all, it merely avoids decreasing it.

In a global economy, the jobs that are created through GDP growth might not be created here in the U.S., given our slippage in manufacturing. The jobs created here might be restaurant and retail jobs, which are the least productive for the overall economy. Hence Obama’s push to get Americans to make things again. We do still have the world’s second largest manufacturing sector — China only passed the U.S. in 2010. But — and this is anecdotal, so take it for no more than that — entrepreneurs that I meet no longer seem to think they should make things. I’ve talked with two small New England manufacturers in recent weeks. One of them is a fledgling startup that makes its products here, but only because it had a bad experience trying to get its products made in China. The other manufactures all of its output in New Hampshire, but it too is small, and so it doesn’t produce much. Its scientist CEO told me if the company landed a large order, he would immediately seek out a factory in China, rather than try to build a manufacturing line himself.
Loth does raise questions that deserve detailed analysis in the press. Should these overseas profits benefit from the same kinds of offsets that domestically earned profits do?  One of Loth’s commenters argued that companies should have to pay at the same rate regardless of where they do business, just like expatriate individuals do. One thing seems clear: these profits won’t be a magic bullet for our economy, even if they’re taxed in full.

I met Justin Fox, an excellent economics columnist at Fortune for many years, at an April book party for Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century. (It was an odd book party, in that there were almost no books.) I made an off-hand remark about how modern American universities were like the pre-Reformation Catholic church, with their own priesthood (tenure after a monkish period of study, no retirement age, faculty clubs), self-serving yet largely unverifiable dogma (I liked college, but am I really better for having gone?) and system of indulgences (to wit, buildings named after rich people convicted of felonies). He told me he might play with that in a blog post he was working on. I checked his blog at Harvard Business Review a couple of times, and then forgot about it.

Two months later, I get a note from Justin that he posted his item, Synthesis: Disrupting Higher Education. It turns out he was working on a review essay for HBR, drawing on six books. It has all his hallmarks as a columnist and author: clever and wry yet thorough, clear and pointed. He did reference my remark, and graciously did not claim it as his own (I am the nontenured Harvard newcomer mentioned towards the end).

His piece is timely because one of our shibboleths is the strength of our universities. That was true of journalistic institutions a few years ago — in 1991, when I moved to Massachusetts as the Massachusetts Miracle was unwinding, a colleague at Computerworld told me I didn’t need to worry, it wouldn’t affect me. She was right, then. Today, it’s almost unthinkable that American universities will fall by the wayside — one professor at Harvard this year talked about how places like Harvard still exist because the subjects are hard to learn unless you are someplace where you are immersed in them.  I don’t buy it, though I liked being immersed here. Justin’s piece shows that universities are vulnerable, too.
Btw, when I was able to get a copy of “Bad News” it left me more puzzled than chastened. I do feel like I am part of the complacence that emerges in the book, in that I wasn’t out there trying to push stories about how the real estate bubble made no sense, or derivatives were really dangerous. But there clearly was great and prescient reporting happening. The book’s main complaint seems to be that journalists did not rise up as a pack and follow along. The pack instead was being laid off, and those who remained were trying to keep up with the wild antics of the speculators who were distorting the economy (and often getting very rich).

“Bad News” does not bother itself about why journalists were going to do a better job of explaining the perils of CDOs than economists, when in fact economists who consulted on CDOs didn’t understand them — I have attended panels where this was confessed. Nor does it look at how we were supposed to do the economics research economists weren’t interested in, banking being a backwater of economic research at the time, overwhelmed by Freakonomics and other fads.  The “Bad News” essays also relied too heavily on the views of a few very liberal economists, which in places causes it to seem unbalanced. One of those very liberal economists is Joseph Stiglitz, Schiffrin’s husband, who contributed a chapter to the book. Yes, he’s a Nobel Prize winner and often writes persuasively about his views on how economies work, and dramatically about how institutions fail to do the right thing. But those are still his views, and he didn’t win the Nobel for them.

In the end, I found myself agreeing with Chris Roush, who wrote the chapter on how the business press wasn’t as bad as its reputation.