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Forty Years in Forty Sentences

Always regretted that you didn't take that Modern Presidential Politics survey back in college? No worries: just take in this sixty-second rendition, courtesy of Bill Clinton, from a fascinating new interview with Michael Tomasky:

Now, let me just close on an upbeat note here. I don't entirely buy the Ruy Teixiera [and John B. Judis] analysis about the natural Democratic majority. On the other hand, there is something to it.

[Lyndon] Johnson wins big in '64 cuz he marginalizes [Barry] Goldwater. They never got over it and they've been trying to do it to us ever since. By '68, Nixon wins by a point, but we all know he would have beaten [Hubert] Humphrey handily if [George] Wallace hadn't been in the race. So there was a traumatic coalescing of a culturally conservative majority in the Republican Party between '64 and '68, ratified by the '72 election, OK? So essentially from '68 forward the Republican Party had a hardcore base of roughly 45 percent. The Democrats had a hardcore base of roughly 40 percent.

So in '80, Reagan wins 51-to-41, and [John] Anderson gets, what, [6 percent], [7 percent], whatever he got? Then in '84, [Reagan] wins 6-to-4. And in '88, they win 54-to-46, which means they won 9 points of the undecided vote and we won 6 points. In '92, because of the campaign I ran, if no [Ross] Perot had been in there, all the analyses show that it would have been 52 [percent], 53 percent. In '96, if no Perot had been in there and we'd had a normal turnout, it would have been about 55 percent. [So] by 2000, sometime between '92 and 2000, because of immigration, urbanization and the suburbanite voters developing a more communitarian ethic, both parties had a base of about 45 percent. And what happened in 2000 is they were fighting over an effective 10 percent, and they fought to a draw.

So that means that we're in every race. You start with 45 percent, you're in a race. I don't care what anybody says. So sometime between 1992 and 2000, for the first time -- probably in the last four years, for the first time since 1964 -- we were no longer at a cultural disadvantage in our base. So both parties go into this next election with a natural base of about 45 percent. So in 2004, this race will be about -- it goes back to your question about the Democrats' dilemma and our division. We have to improve our turnout to their level, as we did in '98 and 2000 but not in 2002. And then we have to win the votes among the other 10 percent. That's eminently doable.

He makes it sound so easy. Sigh.

Let Me Help You Help Yourself

I've written a little bit here before about the rhythm of writing and publishing books. Having started my publishing career on the Web, I used to bristle at the sluggishness of the print world. But now that I've been through the process three times, I've really grown fond of the pace and pattern of it all, each new stage rolling in like the change of seasons.

One of the milestones that's (usually) fun is the day the first review arrives. For Mind Wide Open, this happened to be yesterday. Early reviews -- the book won't be officially released until mid-February -- are almost always limited to industry publications like Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, and thus are more summaries than value-judgments. But they'll slip a little praise or criticism in most reviews. I'm happy to report that it's the former, not the latter, in the Kirkus review faxed to me yesterday. The pull quote: "An enthusiastic invitation to explore your mind from science writer Johnson, who takes a lucid trip through the country's brain labs... Celebrates the brain's complexity and wonder even as it demonstrates that you can get to know your mind better than you ever thought."

Don't worry -- I won't post here news about every single review that appears. (Just the ones that I feel the need to respond to.) But I thought the I'd share the first one, since it's such a cool little milestone.

By the way, one of the three main categories that Amazon, at least, is listing Mind Wide Open under is "Self-Help." It's totally an appropriate category, but I'm still cracking up a little at the idea that I've written a self-help book. Look out, Dr. Phil!

Apple On Speed

I always enjoy reading the Arstechnica in-depth software reviews, even if I don't always agree with them. Their latest dissection of OS X -- this of version 10.3 (AKA Panther) -- is yet another gem. I was particularly struck by this passage:

Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release –– and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems...

Part of the reason for classic Mac OS's slow evolution and generational performance dips is the nature of the code. Classic Mac OS is a tangled wad of phone cord next to Mac OS X's neatly-ordered spice rack. Mac OS X changes so significantly and improves so rapidly because it can. Whole subsystems are refactored, recoded, or resynchronized with work done elsewhere (e.g. FreeBSD, XFree86, OpenSSL, etc.) to a degree that would (and probably does) make a classic Mac OS programmer's head spin.

For those who haven't been paying attention, this is the big pay-off for going with the Unix-based NeXT platform as the basis for Apple's new OS all those years ago. It gave Apple a modular Unix-flavored foundation that is well-understood by legions of smart developers, many of whom Apple quickly (and smartly) scooped up and put to work on Mac OS X.

At every WWDC, I am more and more impressed at the sheer volume of "stuff" that has changed under the hood in each new Mac OS X release...

I'd been thinking a little recently about Apple and speed, though not speed in the sense of window redrawing, but speed in the sense of upgrade cycles. It seems to me that Apple has managed to release a prodigious amount of new software in the past two years: two significant upgrades to OS X, each with hundreds of new features (along with the performance increases.) But also think of all the new applications. Start with the iLife package -- major upgrades to iTunes including the Apple Music Store; upgrades to iMovie and iDVD; entirely new applications in iPhoto and iChat AV. And then somehow they've managed to produce what basically amounts to a complete productivity suite, built from scratch: iCal, Address Book, Mail, Keynote, iSync. And on top of that, in a year they've managed to assemble what a lot of people seem to think is the best browser on the market -- Safari.

Am I missing something, or is this a significantly faster development cycle than Microsoft's? Exclude all the things that aren't directly in Apple's market (the XBox games, PocketPC development, etc) and focus just on Windows OS development and consumer applications. They basically update Windows and Office every 2-3 years, and they've brought out a couple of new applications over the past 48 months that come to mind: OneNote, Live Meeting, etc. And then there's the Media Center version of Windows, which is something like the iLife package. But still, considering how much bigger Microsoft is than Apple, it seems amazing to me that Apple's even competitive here, much less ahead of Microsoft in updates/new apps shipped per year.

The question I have is twofold. First, do you think what I've said above is true? And secondly, if it is true, why? Is this like the performance increases that Ars talks about: the ultimate payoff from going with a UNIX core, and generally embracing open-source code (as in Safari, for instance)? Is it a payoff from the Cocoa development environment, which supposedly makes it incredibly easy to develop new applications? Is it the fact that most of these Apple apps are more minimalist in their features, as opposed to Microsoft's bloatware, thus making it easier to get stuff out the door? Or is there some other ingredient I'm missing...

In Which The Blogger Turns One

So yesterday, the 11th, was my one year bloggiversary. I raise a glass to all of you, dear readers, trackbackers, lurkers, and comment spammers. I couldn't have done it without you. (Actually, I could have done without the spam, but that's another story.) I'm more than a little pleased to find the blog continuing to percolate at its steady, if not exactly round-the-clock, pace. I'm a pretty driven person, but I've always been chronically hopeless at things like keeping journals. So the fact that the blog is still a big part of my life one year later is a pleasant surprise.

I suspect the most rewarding part of all of this will arrive ten or twenty years from now, reading through the archives in chronological order, making all the long-forgotten connections ("That's right -- we were just moving into the Brooklyn house when I came up with the idea for that book," etc.) Writing books and articles gives you a nice snapshot of where your head was at on the scale of months or years, but the blog gives you the week by week (and sometimes day by day) account: all the little trails you followed and then abandoned, or the half-formed ideas that lay fallow for a season before blossoming into something useful. You get a record not of your final, polished thoughts, but rather your hunches and dead-ends.

For those of you who missed the early days, here's my first post explaining the URL, and my second post explaining what I was hoping to get out of the blog. Both still apply.

The Unthinking Man's President

Jake Weisberg's brief editorial from Slate a few days ago was dead-on, I'd say. Especially this closing bit:

Back during the 2000 campaign, George Will and others argued that presidential intelligence didn't matter. This notion was reinforced after Sept. 11, when it became fashionable to argue that Bush's "moral clarity" was preferable to the ability to comprehend many sides of a complicated issue. In fact, presidential intelligence does matter. The intellectual qualities Bush lacks –– historical knowledge, interest in the details of policy, and substantive (as opposed to political) judgment –– might well have prevented the quagmire we're facing in Iraq right now. A more engaged president –– one who understood, for instance, the difference between the Sunnis and the Shiites –– surely would have asked about Plan B.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the "comprehending many sides of a complicated issue" point lately, every time I hear the President or his people ask the rhetorical question: "Can anyone really say that the world is not a safer place with Saddam Hussein out of power?" It's meant to be a no-brainer, but it only seems that way if you're looking at the problem without using your brains, or at least looking at the problem without comprehending many sides of a complicated issue.

This is not mushy, "both sides now" multiculturalism. It's realpolitik. (In this debate, strangely enough, the anti-war Democrats are the hardened pragmatists, and the neocons the pie-in-the-sky optimists.) Because the truth is you can't just surgically remove Hussein, and have the only secondary effect of that removal be his no longer controlling Iraq and its allegedly vast arsenal. When you swoop down pre-emptively on another country and depose its leader -- however hateful the leader -- you set in motion a chain of events that are partly predictable, and partly out of your control. Some of those events are Plan A events, in Weisberg's terms -- things that would have happened even if the occupation had gone well. We would have ticked off our allies in Europe, and angered countless young Arab men, even if we had been greeted as liberators after the invasion. And some are Plan B events: maybe the Iraqi people will greet us as an invading force, or at least a "meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss" force; maybe Iraq will become a lightning rod and rallying cry for every wannabe terrorist organization on the planet; maybe Iraq will fall into the hands of radical Islamic groups who hate us even more than Hussein did.

And this is where our Presidential IQ comes into play. Being able to comprehend many sides of a complicated issue is all about recognizing that the secondary chain of events often cancels out whatever was virtuous in the initial intervention. It feels good to overthrow the brutal dictator, but maybe the means don't justify the ends in this particular case, because the means have other effects that go against the interests of ordinary American citizens. (By making the US more despised around the globe, particularly in regions likely to breed terrorism; by creating a war zone where small, easily-executed anti-US strikes are guaranteed global publicity; by setting a precedent where it's okay for one state to just summarily decide to remove the leader of another state.) When people argue against the Iraq war it's not because they're "soft on terror"; it's because they believe the totality of secondary effects that come out of removing Hussein will likely make the world a more dangerous place in the end. It's not just enough to do the math on what taking down Saddam alone will achieve. You have to solve the entire equation. And that takes intelligence, not just moral clarity.

The Dodgy Bits

Here's a question I have for our UK readers: so my wife and I go to see Love Actually, the latest romantic comedy from Four Wedding and Funeral's Richard Curtis. And there's a scene where Hugh Grant (playing the Prime Minister) is asking his Monica-Lewinsky-lookalike assistant about where she lives. I can't remember the name of the area she mentions, but let's say it's Peckham. The dialog goes something like this:

Assistant: I live Peckham, the dodgy side.
Grant: What is the dodgy side of Peckham.
Assistant: All the way at the end of the Harwith Road.
Grant: That is dodgy.

Now, in the screening we saw here in New York, pretty much every mention of the word "dodgy" got a laugh, particularly the last two. And it's clearly supposed to be a funny exchange, and the word "dodgy" is crucial to the humor. In a way, this is representative of a lot of jokes that Curtis writes; they have a tendency to revolve around the comic potential of slightly, um, dodgy British expressions, like "bugger," and "shag," and -- several times in Love Actually -- "cockup."

I understand perfectly well why Anglophile American audiences eat this stuff up: the humor comes from proper Englishfolk talking trash. But how does it play on its home turf? I thought about how this scene from Love Actually would play if it were Americans talking:

I live in Newark, the seedy part.
What is the seedy part of Newark?
Over by the airport.
Oh, that is seedy.

To my American ears, that's not funny at all. So why should the British version be funny to Brits? Or perhaps it's not?

Google Ads Are On Drugs

Jesus, one lousy post about Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love and every single GoogleAd on the front door is for heroin detox programs. Kind of a downer, no?

(Of course, by adding a new post with the phrase "heroin detox program" I've just made matters worse. Oops, did it again.)

I feel as though I'm losing control of the message on the blog: I've got Google trying to get you all into a detox clinic, and the spammers selling you Ambien and Viagra in the comment threads. There's got to be a happy medium between these two extremes. Can't we all just get along?

By the way, I've been running Jay Allen's wonderful Blacklist to deal with the comment spam, which has improved the situation somewhat, though I'm still spending an annoying amount of time pruning. We'll see how it goes from here...

Panther, Red In Tooth And Claw

Interfaces change with the same co-evolutionary rhythms that ecosystems do: introduce a new species (or a new trait within an existing species) and a whole series of lateral effects unfold in other organisms, most of them difficult to predict in advance. I've been noticing one of those transformations over the past week, ever since I installed OS X Panther, and started messing around with Exposé, the highly-touted window management tool that I first raved about many months ago here.

Exposé's every bit as powerful as it promised to be (although I think Kottke has some smart ideas about making it even more powerful.) But what has surprised me in using it is that it has come very close to eliminating my need for the Dock (OS X's all purpose utility for storing icons representing open or frequently used applications, along with collapsed document windows and other basic functions.) I've always been a defender of the Dock -- for some reason, a number of interface experts find it offensive -- and have relied on it constantly ever since I moved to OS X. But Exposé (and Panther's command-tab application switching) has made it increasingly superfluous.

Because Exposé does such a brilliant job dealing with clutter, I no longer need to collapse windows into the Dock to keep things better organized; I get a much better "big picture" view of what's open right now by hitting f9 and seeing all my windows than I do by looking at the dock; I can switch applications more readily through the keyboard by hitting command-tab. I've long included the desktop as an icon in my dock, so I could get to it quickly without closing a ton of windows, but Exposé now lets me do that with by hitting f11. The only thing that the Dock still provides is access to the trash can and application launching, both of which you can do through keystrokes in any Finder window, although it's not quite as easy.

I'm not entirely ready to turn off the Dock altogether, mostly for sentimental reasons. (It's such a signature OS X element.) But I'm thinking about it. I wonder if the Dock and Exposé teams at Apple realized that the two tools would be in competition with each other. Or perhaps it's just me...