as imagined by the Onion News Network:

Via Romenesko, the NYTPicker reports on Times tech reporter David Pogue responding to his critics, who think it’s a conflict of interest for Pogue to write books about tech companies while he’s also reviewing their products. While Romenesko and NYTPicker spotlight Pogue’s rather disingenuous assertion that he is “not a reporter,” the part of his remarks that really grabbed me was this:

“In point of fact this is a problem with the industry. And not so much me alone….It’s about context. Dwight [Silverman] admitted to you that he writes for the Houston Chronicle. And he wrote a Windows book at the same time that he was writing about Windows for the paper. ….and Ed Baig, who writes for an even bigger newspaper than I do, he writes for USA Today, the equivalent column, he wrote Macs for Dummies, Palm Pre: The Missing Manual, he wrote an iPhone book at the same time as he was reviewing those. Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal makes, I think The New Yorker said, $1 million a year off of the D Conferences, where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates make exclusive appearances, the very guys whose products he reviews.

“So it’s a growing problem. You’d probably have a hard time finding someone who doesn’t have a problem like this.”

A growing problem… with the industry! Let’s parse that: what’s the problem that the industry has?  The problem is that, despite pulling down big salaries to give unbiased product reviews, everyone in “the industry” wants more money! Can’t you see what a terrible systemic problem has ensnared David Pogue?

As a lover of falsely precise charts about not actually quantifiable phenomena, I’m obviously a sucker for the Gartner Hype Cycle, the latest report on which was just released:

I do find it hilarious, though, that Gartner refuses (for obvious commerical reasons) to predict the disappearance of any of the technologies on the chart.  Look at the legend: they even create a category of “obsolete before plateau” but then refuse to consign a single technology to that category. Way to go out on a limb, there, Gartner!

A while back I did a Q&A over tea with AdAge’s Simon Dumenco, but only yesterday did he post it to the magazine’s website. No doubt because of his very artful arrangement (a numbered list of “truths about viral culture”), it’s currently the #1 most-read piece on AdAge.com!  What, slow week in the ad biz? Hasn’t someone made a blockbuster new spot with a talking panda in it or something?

I have only one edit I’d make to the Q&A, if I could. Here’s the second “truth”:

2. On the internet, as in life, forget the white-hot center; the margins are what matter.

Wasik, in conversation: “The other fundamental metaphor of the flash mob was the idea of, like, people are going to come together for no reason at all other than that other people are coming together there. I mean, that was sort of always how I felt about New York. The idea that, Oh, I’m in New York, and I’m gonna get as close as possible to the white-hot center of things. But then the closer you get to it, the more you realize that the white-hot center of things is, like, a bunch of middle-aged fat people in a room sipping vodkatinis, and they’re not talking about anything interesting, because the actual work is being done a little further to the margins by people who are still trying to get closer to the center.”

My point wasn’t quite that “the margins are what matter.” Really, what I meant was that the desire to get closer to the center, the act of striving for that center — even though we find the center, when we get close enough, to be essentially hollow — is what matters.

On some level, my book (like my recent Times op-ed) is an extended meditation on the Internet as the new locus for ambition.  That’s a loaded word, of course, and I don’t mean it in an especially pejorative way.  Day by day we all do what we do, creatively and otherwise, for a whole host of different reasons. But over the long haul, there’s a little kernel of something that makes us — some of us, that is — want to go out find an audience, and then to find a bigger audience once we’ve got a small one. That little something is what gets us to New York, instead of someplace more hospitable, or makes us send out pitches and do open mics and put together bands etc. Today, it’s easy to see that little something is sending us online. It’s where the excitement is, where the audience is.

So much of our discourse about the Internet tries to make our participation in it about everything besides ambition: connection, belonging, love, “self-expression,” etc. Obviously the Internet is about all that stuff, too. I wouldn’t bother to focus so much on ambition in online culture if it didn’t seem like there were a conspiracy to elide its role. All these technology pundits — who are nothing if not hyperambitious themselves — look out into the sea of users and see them all as earnest naïfs longing for simple, human connection, or as puppyish fanboys eager to toil anonymously for days on end in a “remix” culture; as anything except ambitious, as people who want to make a name, who want fans, who want basically the same things that the tech gurus want.

Are all the participants in Internet culture like that, or even a majority? Certainly not. But I’d argue — and I do argue, in the book — that the ones who succeed in winning an audience online tend to be precisely those who do so with old-fashioned drive.

http://couldihavelupus.gov

Is some other federal agency squatting on all the good lupus URLs?

I’ve been puzzling over the #1-most-emailed Modern Love column on managing a husband who wants to move out. I guess if I’ve been puzzling over a Modern Love column this long, it can’t be all bad. Some disconnected thoughts:

(1) This approach probably works in a shocking number of situations, because this central insight —

I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.

— is so often correct.

(2) But what about all the situations there this WON’T work? Is it good advice? I guess she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have physically stopped him from moving out. So if he’d really wanted to, he could have done it. And probably, in that case, she’s still better off having treated him like a child; in that case, even though he’d left, she’d still be sitting on the nice high ground, waiting for him but never begging, etc.

(3) OK. So maybe this is a great idea. What’s weird, though, is how essentially religious this whole idea is, without being religious. She’s essentially saying that the family is a non-negotiable bond for her husband, the way it is for a small child. This is the kind of thinking we normally associate with appeals to a higher power.

(4) But she doesn’t mention God; so on whose authority is the family unbreakable? The crazy thing is, the answer is basically her own refusal to suffer. That’s the mindblowing crux of the whole theory. He has to remain a part of the family forever because she refuses to suffer: that refusal is her God. Basically what this woman has done is burrow so far into a sprituality of the self that she’s actually finding a binding commitment for other people in it.

(5) This makes this essay, to my knowledge, the only Styles section article to date that sets forth an entirely new and entirely radical cosmology.

I have an op-ed in Thursday’s Times on how the Internet is (and isn’t) like New York. An excerpt:

Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for young people to pry any free for themselves.

Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.

Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music, building a “presence” in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and, more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful. Every month more YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their “big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the physical one.

Read on…

I contributed a short appreciation of Gay Talese’s book Thy Neighbor’s Wife to the great literary blog The Second Pass. Here’s the opening:

Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the Sexual Revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted. Whereas most political or spiritual or cultural movements, from Communism to Esperanto to est, came and went and left the Western sensibility not too far from where it started, a time traveler direct from 1959 would stare slackjawed at the sexual landscape of today, both in its deep fundamentals (the acceptance of homosexuality, the shift in gender roles) and in its showy surfaces, the frankness with which we discuss and display carnal matters in public.

And yet measured against the dreams (certainties, even) of its principled adherents — as a contemporary reader is reminded throughout Gay Talese’s stupendous 1981 book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, recently reissued by Harper Perennial — the Sexual Revolution remains unfinished and seemingly unfinishable. Shame in sex was not vanquished. Monogamy was not proved an unnatural construct. Indeed, if sexual behavior has liberalized during the past fifty years, sexual attitudes have arguably become more conservative, with belief in a single, destined “soul mate” now the moony norm. Talese’s book was seen as unforgivably sordid in its day (for its reportorial methods as well as for its subject matter), but today Thy Neighbor’s Wife is fascinating for how tragic it all seems, how unfulfilled the expectations of so many of its protagonists ultimately remained.

Read the whole thing here.

I was consumed with book tour during the dust-up a few weeks ago over Caleb Crain’s NYT review of Alain de Botton’s new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. (After Crain posted a link to the review at his blog here, Botton commented somewhat hysterically in the thread here, and the inevitable bloggy eruption ensued.) I made a note to go back and read the review, perhaps because as a new author myself, I could relate to de Botton’s emotion, even if I couldn’t endorse his approach to expressing it.

A week or so ago I finally had a chance to read Crain’s review, and immediately I began to suspect that my sympathies lay with de Botton. Here’s a representative excerpt from the review:

To mock [a worker] for being less than perfectly free in his thoughts and actions is easy. Unfortunately, the British essayist Alain de Botton indulges in this kind of mockery in his new book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.” De Botton starts with noble intentions, claiming in his first chapter to have been inspired to write about work by the intense, unabashed interest taken by cargo-ship spotters, the hobbyists who track the comings and goings of the enormous oceangoing vessels that help to make globalization possible. The spotters “know what it is about the world that would detain a Martian or a child,” de Botton writes. But in his praise of their wonder, there is a note of condescension: “Admittedly, the ship spotters do not respond to the objects of their enthusiasm with particular imagination. They traffic in statistics.”

The note is soon revealed to be an ostinato…. In the book’s most promising passage, a career counselor invites de Botton into his home office in South London to observe sessions with a client, a 37-year-old tax lawyer. … But just as revelation seems under way, de Botton’s narrative drifts, and he frets for pages about self-­esteem-boosting bromides that he hears the career counselor dispense at a seminar, worrying that in feeling superior to them he may be depriving himself of a psychological advantage. In the end, anxiety about social status undermines the chapter completely. The counselor’s office, de Botton has noticed, smells “powerfully of freshly boiled cabbage or swede,” one of several signs that the enterprise doesn’t securely rank as upper-middle class… If a disinterested writer won’t try to distinguish the efficacy of an endeavor from its trappings, who will? What else was the counselor hoping for, when he agreed to share his experiences with de Botton?

Basically the whole review goes on like this, with Crain pulling out some jaundiced bit of narrative color from one of de Botton’s scenes and then wringing his hands about the terrible mockery implied. Since all context has been stripped from this color, it’s impossible to tell from the review why de Botton had gone to the trouble to leave his comfy essayist’s chair and go write about work, or workers, at all.

I’ve now had the opportunity to read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work in its entirety, and can now say that my sympathies lie squarely, emphatically with de Botton. It’s a marvelous little book, and I encourage everyone to run out and buy it. I’ve hesitated to read much de Botton in the past, because his previous books have struck me (on a cursory bookstore browse, at least) as a bit too precious, but on the strength of this one I’m certain to go back and read a few of them.

Pleasures and Sorrows is, first and foremost, a lovely bit of narrative journalism.  De Botton makes no bones about the cerebral awkwardness with which he approaches the reportorial endeavor, and so naturally all sorts of odd observations intrude—some at the mild expense of his subjects, like those which Crain seems so horrified to encounter, but just as many at his own expense. Watching a tuna clubbed to death on a boat deck prompts in de Botton the thought “that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves.” (Almost every page yields up a sentence like that.)

All the storytelling is animated by a particular pose that de Botton takes towards his subjects, an elegant remove that reinforces formally the very ideas about work that he’s unobtrusively but definitively sketching around the edges. He’s always taking a hundred-year (or many-hundred-year) perspective on what he’s seeing, imagining what about the inner workings of (say) industrial biscuit manufacture might impress an educated individual of the 18th century or the 23rd.  And so he focuses entirely on questions of human meaning, both individual and shared, as he watches various people in their daily tasks. He is not “mocking” anyone for their lack of freedom; he is rather  attempting to assess with clear eyes what different types of jobs mean today—to those who do them, yes, but even more so to the wider society and to history.

Crain is usually a very smart critic, in my opinion, but I think he has simply misread de Botton’s book from the beginning. In his first chapter, de Botton does cite cargo-ship spotters as inspiration for his project. But at the very end of the chapter (in that classic “nut graf” spot where an experienced skimmer knows to look), he quite succinctly describes what he intends for his book to resemble:

[T]he author hopes [the book] might
function a little like one of those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace—inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.

It’s hard to believe that any review would glide this by, and outright strange for a negative review to do so: if one wants to accuse de Botton of failing, it’s odd not to consider the aesthetic terms on which he was hoping to succeed. But those aesthetic terms are precisely what Crain seems oblivious to. He writes as if there were no middle ground, in narrative journalism, between sympathy and mockery; as if journalistic subjects, in exchange for access, were entitled to have their stories told just as they wanted. Crain, it seems, would hold Canaletto accountable to each docker, each seamstress and baker, and to their conception of how they might fit into the swirling whole.

To his credit, de Botton flies far too high for that. I mean it as a compliment to say that he never troubles himself overmuch with what his subjects think about themselves. This isn’t to say Pleasures and Sorrows is a perfect book; there are some cringe-worthy moments, but usually these happen when, in trying to poke fun at himself, de Botton spins out semi-ironic erudition that manages to be arrogant and self-defeating at the same time. (The worst of these is to be found in the final chapter, where he offers a nearly page-long speech referencing Goethe and Gibbon that he allegedly gave to the profane watchman of an airplane graveyard; it comes off as the worst sort of Brit-prig BBC comedy, and one wishes it could be excised from every copy.) But all in all, it’s a superlative piece of work and I’m glad that de Botton’s juvenile online outburst caused his very mature book to be brought to my attention.