The Creature

The Thick House's production of The Creature in San Francisco isn't quite the best Frankenstein ever — Mel Brooks' film may actually qualify for that honor — but it's certainly the best adaptation of Mary Shelly's novel you could hope to see. Originally conceived as radio play, the production has the characters speak almost entirely in quotations from the book, successfully conveying the original's uncanny mix of gothic horror, gothic romance, religious-philosophical allegory, and foundational proto-science-fiction. In a break from the novel's structure of a memoir within a memoir within a memoir, the play interleaves Victor's telling of the tale with the monster's, revealing numerous clever juxtapositions which cast both tellings as unreliable.

That may sound too heady to be entertaining, but the play is thoroughly gripping, due largely to James Carpenter's performance as the monster and smart direction that gets a lot of life out of simple staging. Standing atop the table where he was born whenever he confronts his creator, you see a monster eight feet tall. And the next time I read the novel, I am sure that I will hear the monster speak with Carpenter's voice.

Playing this weekend and next. Joe Bob says check it out.

McIlheran's Making Someone Else Pay

There are a million other things I should be doing with my time, but duty calls. An old acquaintance asks, “What's the response to this?” He then provides a link to a Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinal article by Patrick McIlheran, “Making someone else pay.”

My response, in brief, is that it's mendacious, incoherent nonsense. It's a jumble of weird little arguments that to discuss I'll need to tackle in painful detail.

Suppose that, besides being the Enemies of All Mankind, health insurers are actually right.

Some companies noted last week that Congress' plans to mandate that everyone buy health insurance include only weak penalties. The plans also make insurers take on customers who are already sick. If you're young and daring, you pay the low penalty and go insurance-free until your doctor says you've got cancer. You then apply and pay $800-a-month premiums for $10,000-a-month care. Sweet, until the industry inevitably collapses, say insurers.

OK, this is an important point, so important that it has a name: adverse selection. The healthiest are tempted to go without insurance, driving up the cost of insurance for everyone else. Currently, this is screwy on both ends: healthy people gamble on going uninsured, and insurers try to avoid covering the sick. The proposals on the table try to fix both ends, requiring that everyone buy insurance, and requiring insurers to sell the same insurance to anyone who asks. If the mandate doesn't work right, that two-edged solution breaks down.

Is this really a problem? Most states require drivers to have automobile insurance, and while some people cheat on the requirement enough people obey that the system works. The mandate doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough. If the mandate policy we enact isn't good enough, we can tweak just that part of the policy to fix it without having to call the whole thing into question.

Is there a reason to think this problem cannot be solved? McIlheran is supposing that the concerns that insurance companies have raised are correct. Is anyone else worried about this, beyond McIlheran and the insurers? Not that I've heard, and I'd think McIlheran would bring it up if they did. But okay, he's asked us to suppose it's true. Let's see what he hangs on this thread ....

Suppose they're right. Insofar as Assurant, one of the nation's bigger writers of individual policies, employs 1,900 in its Milwaukee hometown, that's a lot of Milwaukeeans out of a job. The company also leads in high-deductible plans of the kind Obamacare would ban. I know we're supposed to hate insurers, but must we also want their staff unemployed?

McIlheran is supposing that as a result of the new policy which mandates that everyone buy insurance the result is actually that less people buy insurance.

Note also that McIlheran is saying that reform advocates want to stoke our hatred for insurers, which will make it OK if Assurant fails ... because the reform won't work. This is like saying I want car drivers to drown — because I say I want to build a bridge, but the ferryboat drivers say the bridge will collapse.

If we're toting up the cost of Obamacare, there's surely a ledger line for the demolition of an industry, even an unpopular one. Insurers' power will be transferred to federal agencies, their earnings to a public option, their workers to the dole. Ah, well: Villains defeated.

OK, we've gone from Assurant going out of business because we've screwed up the mandate policy to the entire health insurance industry dying and ... how did the public option get into this conversation?

Recall that McIlheran has hung this scenario on the flawed-mandate-policy hook. This is a little odd, since the scenario he's talking about has been much discussed from another angle.

Health care policy folks who favor the combination of mandates and stronger insurer regulation often argue that regulation isn't enough, because insurers get good at finding loopholes. You also need insurers competing with one another to offer better service. But in many markets there aren't enough insurers competing with one another, so we should provide an extra insurer available to everyone: the Federal government. This competing government-administered insurance — the public option — wouldn't be free, you'd have to pay premiums just like any other insurance.

Some proponents of this policy argue that the public option would compete so well with the private insurers that it would drive many of them out of business, maybe even all of them. The public option would have an edge over private insurance because it wouldn't need to turn a profit and would be big enough to be able to negotiate good prices with suppliers like drug companies. With Federally-run Medicare demonstrating by many measures that it can deliver lower administrative costs, better health outcomes, and better patient satisfaction than private insurance, this is at least a plausible argument.

Proponents say this is a good thing because the public option wins by virtue of actually being better than private insurance. McIlheran says this is a bad thing because ...

Ah, well: Villains defeated.

This is exactly the spirit of Obamacare. The animating drive is to transfer: mainly money, from those who pay to those who need. The strongest appeal of Democrats' plans is that you needn't worry about coverage because someone, presumably a villain, will pay for it.

“Obamacare” is a plot to destroy the insurance companies, which no one will notice because Democrats have cast the insurers as villains. As part of their plan, the Democrats will pass laws requiring that you buy insurance from these villains. But those laws won't be good enough, so the insurers will go out of business.

Why are Democrats doing this? Because they want to obscure their plan to transfer money by falsely implying that insurance companies will pay for it. Who will pay for this dastardly plan?

Who, exactly?

Ask first who won't pay. Doctors? Maybe not. One reason the Senate's latest plan didn't worsen the deficit by the $1 trillion that congressional accountants earlier reckoned was that its writers hid huge sums in Medicare payments off the books. They did this to buy the support of the American Medical Association. Doctors are right not to want to be shafted. Trust that they'll lobby to make sure of it.

This aside about doctors is a little strange. I presume that McIlheran is just using it as a platform for his unsubstantiated little dig hinting at Medicare corruption. But while we're here, I may as well observe that the lobbying power of the AMA is a problem for health care reform that I'm disappointed to see no one taking seriously.

Insurance companies won't. Their pleas will be heard, bailouts granted. The industry, in fact, seemed to be going along with Obamacare in hopes of finding a utility-like role in a government-dominated system.

Now I have whiplash. Obamacare's mandate that we buy health insurance is a plot to destroy insurers, which insurers are going along with because the government is sure to prop them up. Huh?

So all that blather about the death of the insurance companies was just to set up the casting of insurance companies as villains to hide something. What?

You, however, may have an ATM-like role. The plan assembled by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) dictates premiums on a sliding scale — 12% of income, about $8,700 a year, for the median Waukesha County family, for instance. We'll all be paying extra to cover people who earn less.

This liberal notices that when McIlheran talks about what we all will do, all of us does not include the people who earn less than the median income. That is to say, half the population. Helping poor people get insurance is stealing from anyone who counts.

Those figures assume, by the way, massive, improbable cuts in costs.

This unsupported assertion is a cheap throwaway to suggest that health insurance reform will cost you money. But the cost of health care is a problem independent of how we provide insurance for it. And as we'll see, now that the supposition that the mandate system will break down has enabled McIlheran to make reform sound scary, he's going to switch to scaring us with the rising costs that don't have anything to do with any reforms that have been proposed.

First, though, he wants to argue that the problem with health insurance reform will be people paying into it too equally.

Who else pays? The healthy: Patsies who obey the law and buy insurance before they're sick. Their premiums will cover those who don't bother until they've incurred huge bills.

Mainly, the young will pay. They tend to use less care. Obamacare depends on this: Young workers' premiums are needed to fill the pool as aging workers drain it. That's how insurance works, they say. They mistake insurance, which pools similar risks, with the pooling of known dissimilar costs, which is called a raw deal.

The arrangement is like another “compact between generations,” Medicare, in which young workers pay with the expectation of collecting later. But Medicare, which works fine for now, will be insolvent by 2017, say its trustees. The young will pay for that now and later.

The real winners in Obamacare aren't the elderly. They're already covered, though Baucus' plan cuts Medicare massively. It is, rather, the pre-retirement demographic, not old enough for Medicare, insured but worried, and costly to cover.

Such people usually are in their peak earning years. They've had time to save up, pay off the mortgage. They are typically far better off than the young who will subsidize them. Yet Congress would transfer huge sums from low-wealth twentysomethings to higher-wealth boomers.

McIlheran is saying outright that old and sick people should pay more for insurance. By his reasoning that insurance is about pooling “similar risks,” then people who are diagnosed with cancer that costs an average of ^$50,000 to treat should pay ^$50,000/year in insurance premiums, protecting them from the risk that their treatment will end up costing ^$75,000 in their particular case. This is obviously not what we want from our health insurance.

He also wants it both ways with Medicare. He just presumes that Medicare is working away when he sets aside the needs of the elderly to characterize the middle-aged as “big winners.” But he also wants to argue that having the young support the needs of the old is bad, because Medicare is bad, because Medicare is insolvent. This is false logic: Medicare's financial woes aren't because it's insurance for the old paid for by the young, they're because of rising medical costs which, as I mentioned earlier, are going to be a problem we have to solve however we structure paying for it.

This whole trope about poor twentysomethings paying for wealthier boomers' health care being screwy does point toward what I think most of us do want—health insurance premiums commensurate with what people can actually afford to pay. But criticizing the Bauchus bill, he suggested that it was wrong that the wealthy should pay more than the poor. He doesn't provide a clear answer for how he thinks it would be fair for people to pay for health care, just multiple contradictory reasons why he thinks that reform will be unfair.

And the young will pay still more. Congress' plans portend huge deficits, even before the evaporation of reformers' fantasies about cutting costs. This will be funded by unprecedented debt. The costs will be paid later, by citizens now so young as to not yet be born.

They'll pay in much higher taxes. They'll pay in withered job opportunities when payroll levies and value added taxes are heaped on as costs spiral. They'll pay as Congress looks for more villains to blame for this debacle and picks some other industry to demolish.

Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria! Again, McIlheran is blaming reform for rising health care costs. That problem doesn't go away if we reject the health insurance reform under discussion this year.

Fortunately, cutting costs is not a fantasy. The rest of the industrialized world successfully gives health insurance to all citizens without going broke, and they do it with less government spending per capita than we already do in the US! So it can be done, and probably can be done better still ... while reducing the risk that ordinary people experience in our current, broken health insurance system.

Art

Remember the time-traveling mechanical elephant I wrote about a while back? There haven't been any sightings lately, but some of his friends have made an appearance in Berlin.

Happy Birthday, Mr Wilde

I offer you Dorothy Parker:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram
I never seek to take the credit
We all assume that Oscar said it

Testing

DrinkSafeTech.com offers a useful product.

The Drink Safe Personal Test kit contains two tests. About the size of a credit card, they incorporate our patented 'Drink Safe' technology to react with a visible color change when they come in contact with a drink spiked with one of the major 'Date Rape' drugs.

They also offer cunning drink coasters with the testing chemistry built in. I'm not sure if I'm more impressed by this clever idea, or more horrified that it's necessary.

Mashup

For lovers of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Austen's Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, and especailly Philip José Farmer's story “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod,” written as if Tarzan had been written by William S Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I offer Bridget Jones' Naked Lunch.

Via Charlie Jane Anders.

Passage

In times past I've quoted my father saying that Doctor Who was just a lot of walking around in corridors and talking. I discover that Martin Anderson at Den of Geek is a connoisseur.

Corridors in science-fiction movies. I love them.

So I'm not the only one!

His article is a great rundown of variations in corridor style. That is, great if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Outrage

Shorter Petition for Roman Polanski

Everyone knows film festivals ought to be lawless temporary autonomous zones, because if a guy can get get arrested at one for raping a child and then skipping bail to avoid prosecution for it, that’s obviously a slippery slope leading toward very bad things like unfriendliness between Americans and the French.

If you love film, don’t look at the list of signatories, as it will only depress you. (Speaking of which: Tilda? You signed this f%&#ing thing? You are no longer my Imaginary Girlfriend.)

“Shorter” invented at D-Squared Digest and brought to fullness at Busy Busy Busy.

Too true

If you've been enjoying The Sartorialist—you know who you are—I offer you a convenient flowchart of how to get photographed by him.

The Obama presidency = geek victory

Update: I just realized that this is a case of “life imitates action figure.”

John Hodgman, of course, saw this this coming.

Compassion

About a month after 9/11, there was a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden to raise money for recovery efforts et cetera. It was full of celebs marching onto the stage to pitch for the fundraising. I watched some of it, and there are two things that stand out in my memory.

One was Steve Buschemi, who it turns out had served with FDNY when he was younger, and had been volunteering. He showed up with the crew he'd been working with, looking haggard—uh, more haggard than usual, that is—and embarrassed by the applause.

The other was Richard Gere, who you may know is a Buddhist. I just found a transcript of what he said.

I think in this situation right now, when, when we have the possibility of taking this energy, this horrendous energy that we're all feeling—and the possibility of turning it into more violence and revenge—we can stop that. We can take that energy and turn it into something else. We can turn it into compassion, into love, into understanding.

the crowd boos loudly

That's apparently unpopular right now, but that's all right.

My friends right now are the cops, the firemen, the emergency workers. Those are the ones who don't ask if you're a good guy or a bad guy if they're going to save you. They don't ask what your religion is when they save you. They just do it because it need to be done.

the crowd cheers

That's the heart that I'm talking about, that's compassion, that's the real thing. That's what we all need to aspire to.

I remember the look on his face when the booing happened. He obviously knew it would be coming. That's walking the walk of fierce compassion.

Unsolicited product endorsement

I used to work with Nanci Houlgate, and in addition to her other skills she turned out to be a very accomplished baker of elaborate and delicious cakes and cookies. She just opened her Etsy store Baked, and I'm already trying to think of an excuse to buy something.

She does have pirate cookies, and International Talk Like A Pirate Day is less than two weeks away ...

Christian charity

Via Pecunium, I learn that Fred Clark at Slacktivist offers an excellent retelling of a story from evangelist Tony Campolo's memoir Let Me Tell You a Story.

After the party, Harry is surprised to learn that Tony is a preacher.

“What kind of church do you belong to?”

“I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.”

Worth clicking through to read the whole thing, including the comments, which feature this gem:

I heard Tony Campolo tell that story a few years ago. And the crowd erupted into applause at that point — but we were checked by Tony holding up his hand. Then he kept talking:

I will never forget his reply. He said ‘No you don't. I'd go to a church that did that.’

Hubris

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.

Last year, everything came apart.

In a long article for the New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman tries to answer the question How did economists get it so wrong?

Business plan

Is it genius, or is it madness?

We start with 100% beef jerky, and SEAR your contact information into it with a 150 WATT CO₂ LASER.

Screw die-cutting. Forget about foil, popups, or UV spot lamination. THESE business cards have two ingredients: MEAT AND LASERS.

Unlike other business cards, MEAT CARDS will retain value after the econopocalypse. Hoard and barter your calorie-rich, life-sustaining cards.

MEAT CARDS do not fit in a Rolodex, because their deliciousness CANNOT BE CONTAINED in a Rolodex.

I'm looking forward to competing Beet Cards for vegetarians.

Men, mad and otherwise

Will Wilkinson, in the course of a right-on blog post talking about how our current era of tricky mixed expectations about how a gent behaves toward women is a good thing, makes an astonishing assertion.

I think part of the fascination for many white guys with the show Mad Men is that it is a window into an attractive (to them) world of white male dominance and privilege that has largely disappeared.

Seriously?

I'm six episodes into the show and all I can think is how fascinatingly awful those people are, and how happy I am that I live now and not then.

Lion of the Senate

Ted Kennedy
1932-2009
Statesman

He was as good at being a United States Senator as anyone ever has been. And by my lights, he was not only good at it—smart, skilled, and crafty—but also good: a liberal with a proudly bleeding heart, leading one fight after another for the needs of the disenfranchised. In a long, fascinating 2003 profile in the Boston Globe, Charles P. Pierce quotes Kennedy's former chief of staff Bancroft Littlefield, Jr.

This is a guy who, the first thing he did in the Senate was take on the poll tax

Yeah.

I've read a few profiles like that one over the years, and two things strike me.

First, it's impossible to resist the idea that he worked hard because the shades of the dead were watching, both the brothers he had to measure up to and the woman to whom he owed a debt.

Second, there's a fascination to his tirelessness at the sheer mechanics of playing a role like his: endless little bits of Taking Care of Business, like this moving story:

On the morning of the day before the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, Senator Ted Kennedy called the White House to inquire if it was appropriate to bring to the burial some earth from Arlington National Cemetery. The answer was essentially a shrug: Who knows? Unadvised, the senator carried a shopping bag onto the plane, filled with earth he had himself dug the afternoon before from the graves of his two murdered brothers. And at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, after waiting for the crowd and the cameras to disperse, he dropped to his hands and knees, and gently placed that earth on the grave of the murdered prime minister.

In that spirit, how about we set aside our conventional eulogies and instead offer the memorial Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice proposes?

The glee of Senator Kennedy’s enemies and ours will be unbounded over the next few days. I’m sure the birfers, astroturfers, industry shills, talibangelicals, Blue Dog DINOs, glibertarians, neocons, and general malefactors of great wealth will weep crocodile tears as they lament that Teddy’s death should not be used as an opportunity by crass liberals to pass the kind of serious health care reform he spent the last thirty years championing. And that, my friends and President Obama, is why it’s time to come back after Labor Day with a single coherent Senator Edward M. Kennedy Health Care Reform Bill, and to twist whatever arms, ears, or other parts are necessary to get a good strong comprehensive bill passed and signed, NOW. We owe the memory of a great man no less.

Today's quote

Via Hal O'Brien, from Stephen Minkin's obscure novel A No Doubt Mad Idea:

On to the library. And all through his time at the card catalog, combing the shelves, filling out the request cards, he danced a silent, flirtatious minuet of the eyes with a rosy-cheeked redhead in the biology section, pages of notes spread before her. All his life, he had had a yen for women in libraries. In a cerebral setting, the physical becomes irresistible. Also, he figured he was really more likely to meet a better or at least more compatible woman in a library than in a saloon. Ought to have singles libraries, with soups and salads, Bach and Mozart, Montaignes bound in morocco; place to sip, smoke, and seduce in a classical setting, noon to midnight. Chaucer's Salons, call them, franchise chain.

Oh yeah.

America's finest news source

The Onion: “Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care.” Read the whole thing.

Angels are the New UFOs

I should have suspected as much. Dig the crazy trailer for Legion, the forthcoming Killer Angel Action Movie.

By owning a copy of The Prophecy on DVD, featuring Christopher Walken as the archangel Gabriel and Elias Koteas as a priest turned cop, I feel I'm ahead of the curve on this one.

Don't you forget about me

John Hughes
1950-2009
Filmmaker

I'm pretty much the exact right age to mourn the passing of Mr Hughes: I was a teenager when he was making movies for teenagers, and I still feel a great affection for his work. (Though sitting down with a friend recently to watch my personal favorite of his films, Some Kind of Wonderful, we agreed that it was a very good thing that we were no longer teenagers and so emotionally raw.)

I remember some critics at the time dismissing Hughes as just telling teenagers what they wanted to hear: you're smart and adults are stupid. Those critics are half-right: Hughes did tell teenagers what they wanted to hear, but he had a much less cynical, and more correct, understanding of what that was. Reviewing Hughes' career, Roger Ebert quotes him:

Kids are smart enough to know that most teenage movies are just exploiting them .... People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again.

Hughes says yeah, parents and schoolteachers and other adults are usually foolish and always uncool, but most of them actually love their teenage charges and are trying to do right by them. Sex is a powerful force, but love is more important. Not everyone you love will return your love, but love is still worth pursuing because if you seek it out you will find it ... most importantly with your friends. And the English language is the greatest toy in the world.

It turns out that these things are not only what I wanted to hear when I was a teenager, they're what I've found to be true as an adult. Nice work.

Update: Twitter informs me about an astonishing and moving blog post about a teenager's correspondence with Mr Hughes.

Marriage

Neil Gaiman, saying “it's either beautiful or the stupidest thing I've read today” points us to a UK Telegraph story about a yellow marriage between a woman and an amusement park ride.

“I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” she said.

Miss Wolfe first fell for the ride when she was 13: “I was instantly attracted to him sexually and mentally.

“I wasn’t freaked out, as it just felt so natural, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to have feelings for a fairground ride.”

Ten years later, she decided to go back to Knoebels Amusement Park to declare her love. She now sleeps with a picture of the ride on her ceiling and carries its spare nuts and bolts around to feel closer to it.

She claims to believe they share a fulfilling physical and spiritual relationship and does not get jealous when other people ride it.

The Telegraph also offers us stories of the brides of Le Tour Eiffel and the Berlin Wall. A little research finds a website for objectùm-sexuals.

How can one love an inanimate object?

Indeed, the meaning of love comes into question. However, there is no single definition because this feeling has many levels and crosses every part of the spectrum. Virtually every one and every thing can be loved. Love does not have any rules that requisite to whom or to what we express this multifaceted emotion, as long as it causes no violation or harm to the subjected.

Maybe I'm just in a romantic mood today but reading that, to Mr Gaiman's point, makes me go with “beautiful.”

Astroturf

Via the magnificent Rachel Maddow, I learn of the Hawthorn Group.

The Hawthorn Group is an international public affairs company of senior political communications specialists. Hawthorn helps solve business and policy problems—crisis, legislative, media, customer, financial and employee—for corporations, governments, associations and non-profit organizations.
....
Specializing in complex policy issues and heavily regulated industries—beverage, banking, energy, gaming, healthcare, insurance, natural resources, security, trade and utilities—Hawthorn currently represents a diverse group of industry-leading clients.

Got that? They're PR guys for corporations. To translate some of those terms, we're talking about corporations that do stuff like drill for oil, operate casinos, deny people's health insurance claims, blow up mountains to get the minerals, and send guys with guns to solve clients' problems. In short: evil corporations.

Their newsletter page reads today:

We thought the most fixated of the political and communications “junkies” might find interesting some highlights of a recent grassroots campaign Hawthorn created and managed for the American Coalition of Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).

“Grassroots campaign.” I do not think that word means what they think it means.

Deceiving us has become an industrial process.

A Short History of America

Via James Howard Kunstler I am informed that Robert Crumb's immortal comic A Short History of America has a sequel.

Three songs

You probably already know “Come Together.”

John Lennon famously said, “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry,’ ” and “Come Together” owes so much to Berry's song “You Can't Catch Me” that Lennon was sued by Chuck Berry's publisher.

Here's another song that owes a big debt to “You Can't Catch Me,” James McMurtry's “Chocktaw Bingo,” our “new national anthem.”

Update: When I saw Julie Taymor's Across The Universe, I laughed out loud at this scene, because I recognized why the character of JoJo is introduced dressed like Chuck Berry ... as the soundtrack gives us “Come Together:”

Update: Just for fun: a cover of “Come Together” from Pomplamoose.

Time & management

Paul Graham offers a nifty essay about two kinds of working schedule.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

I'd add a couple of observations from my experience as an interaction designer.

When I was a consultant, I worked in a very small team that got to set its own rhythm of work internally, which meant that we could take the right sized chunks of time to do things most of the time. This had huge benefits for our productivity, both in the volume of work we could do and its quality.

Plus, I have to observe that the calendaring tools that we use — I'm talking, of course, about MS Outlook primarily — are designed (if badly) around the manager's style of schedule, with a simpleminded conception of fixed blocks of time. But almost everyone needs the ability to tell their calendar “every day between 12:00 and 2:00 I need at least half an hour free in which to eat lunch.” And many people need the ability to tell their calendar things like “each week I need 15 hours outside of meetings, including at least two uninterrupted three-hour blocks of time”. This is the kind of stuff top executives have personal assistants to do, but well designed software could do many of the same things. I have a good job, but if someone wants to pay me to design that system, I'm up for talking about it ....

That's the way it is

Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America's most trusted newscaster?

Again, it's about the difference between facts and truth, and knowing, on some level, that he's telling the other newscasters to stop hurting America.

Habeas corpus

I've been holding my breath, hoping that the moves the Obama administration has made to justify detention without trial as policy, á la Guantànamo, have been a head fake intended to create the political opportunity to do the opposite. I'm turning blue, here: it's looking more and more like the Obama administration is entirely serious about giving the US government institutional mechanisms for locking people up without a trial. Glenn Greenwald has the latest.

A task force appointed by President Obama to issue recommendations on how to close Guantanamo announced yesterday it will miss its deadline and instead needs a six-month extension, potentially jeopardizing Obama's promise to close Guantanamo within a year.  The announcement was made in a briefing given by four leading Obama officials, where the condition of the briefing was that none of the officials could be named (why not?) and all media outlets agreed to this condition (why?).  

Though the Task Force's final recommendations were delayed, it did release an interim report (.pdf) which — true to Obama's prior pledges — envisions an optional, three-tiered “system of justice” for imprisoning accused Terrorists, to be determined by the Obama administration in each case:  (1) real trials in real courts for some; (2) military commissions for others; and (3) indefinite detention with no charges for the rest.  This memo is the first step towards institutionalizing both a new scheme of preventive detention and Obama's version of military commissions.

From this interim report, it's more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions — there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture — is an absolute myth.

I am very displeased to be using my “the horror” label on a post about the President of the United States again.

Apollo XI

Today I find myself thinking of how as the year 2000 approached there was lots of talk of the Greatest X of the 20^th Century or the Most Important Y of the Millenium.

When talk came around to the Greatest Artwork of the 20^th Century, I certainly had to respect folks who went with Guernica or Le Sacre du Printemps or Seven Samurai. But for me, it's no contest.

For what, other than art, can you call a human being standing on the surface of the Moon? Whatever other explanations one might offer, we went to the Moon not because it was useful, but for the same reason we do all art. We felt at some deep human level that it was simply too compelling an idea not to take the effort to make it happen.

What could be more human? We are curious monkeys. We will risk our lives to know something more about the world. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to see it for ourselves. Then, unsatisfied, we will risk our lives again to touch it.

What could be more emblematic of the 20^th Century? It would have been impossible before: the integral role of technology, that great force of the century, is obvious. And with that there is also the role of technological hubris. The 20^th Century political order gave us governments able to gather the resources ... and driven enough by rivalry to invest those resources into it. Global communications meant that half a billion people could participate in it as it happened.

And to that last point, when we talk about it, we ordinarily say that “we went to the Moon.” Not those three astronauts, not NASA, not the United States of America. We went, all of us. In part as witnesses, yes, but also truly as participants, because doing it took just about everything we had. Everything we knew about nature, and technology, and the human frame ... the wealth of the world providing the resources to build the machines, and to support and train the people who did the work ... the wit and skill of people from around the world ... and everything our ancestors did to bring us to the place where we had enough to work with. All of us, even people like me who were not yet born, as the future witnesses who would make the act immortal.

What will be the greatest artwork of the 21^st Century? It's easy to say the next step, but that seems wrong to me. I like the idea of the Clock of the Long Now. But the century is young; it's more likely something I cannot imagine. Whatever it will be, it has a tough act to follow.

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Update: @vruba at Tupperwolf has a similar thought about Apollo and the Space Shuttle.

Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.So people see space exploration as part of the military-industrial complex. And it is. Kind of.

Power wants what it doesn’t have, and it can’t have art. Art needs power’s materials and protection, but fears its responsibilities. Even when they come to terms, power never owns art, only a contract, and art is never safe, only sheltered. High on the cathedrals, the stonecarvers make satirical gargoyles. Space exploration is art, but we have to keep this secret. We must not say in public that it’s how humanity in a technological age reaches outside itself, how we find a mirror distant enough to see to our edges, how we face the void. Shhh.

We have grown some of the great monumental art of our time right on the institutions of fear and violence, like a bromeliad on the saggital crest of a rogue ape. We made a lot of awful compromises to do it. But we did it.

And @vruba also has some words about Earthrise and other things which I think you really out to check out.

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Update: As one would expect, on this subject Carl Sagan brings it.

Carter

I've spoken in praise of Jimmy Carter before. You'd think after finally winning the Nobel he'd be ready to ease up. But via Terry Karney I learn that Mr Carter is still bringing the awesome.

I have been a practising Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief — confirmed in the holy scriptures — that we are all equal in the eyes of God.