stevenberlinjohnson.com

Comment Spam

Anil reminded me that the online version of my contribution to Wired's Google cover story -- a little piece about comment spammers-- is now available. I worked quite hard at this one, despite the abbreviated word count, because I really wanted to make comment spam something that would be actually fun to read about. It has a weirdly lyrical feel, this one, which I think turned out quite nice. But you can be the judge.

I'll be talking in D.C. (my old hometown) tonight -- Monday -- at Politics and Prose at 7 PM. And then back to NYC, where I'll be doing a book talk at KGB Tuesday night. After that, the schedule lightens dramatically, which will no doubt be good news to most of you.

Number Five

Okay, I know I promised not to obsess about my Amazon Sales Ranking in this space, but some days you have to make an exception. Take a look at Amazon's bestseller list this morning: it's Da Vinci Code, South Beach Diet, The Passion, Dan Brown's earlier book, and then... drumroll, please... Mind Wide Open.

Gotta love that Fresh Air.

Is The Gay Marriage Ban Good Politics?

A word about the President's proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I won't even get into how noxious I find the whole idea, since others have expressed their contempt with such eloquence already. Let's just focus on the politics of this amendment. You hear folks say that this was just a cheap, election-year move, but I'm not convinced that it's a move that helps Bush in the end. Here's my thinking -- there are basically four groups of voters out there who are at play in this political equation:

1. Hard right, presumably Christian conservatives who support Bush but were not planning on voting until this gay marriage amendment convinces them to get out to the polls

2. Independent swing voters who are on the fence about who to vote for, but feel so passionately about ending gay marriage that they decide to support Bush.

3. Independent swing voters who are on the fence about who to vote for, but are not particularly homophobic and are definitely creeped out by the idea of altering the Constitution to deny rights to a group of American citizens, and who thus decide to vote for Kerry (or whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be.)

4. Far-left voters who buy the old Nader line that both parties have sold out to corporate America (and who either voted for Nader or sat out the last election altogether) who are so enraged by the bigotry of this amendment that they decide to hold their noses and vote for a Democrat this year.

Now, for the President's calculus to make sense, there have to be more folks in categories 1 & 2 than in categories 3 & 4. I have no numbers to back this up, but I have a hard time believing that there are more voters in those first two categories: the hard right tends to be better about getting out to the polls and supporting the Republican candidate than the far left does with the Democratic candidate; and independents tend to be pretty tolerant on the whole, and they don't like the government messing around with private lives.

In fact, I wonder whether, with this single speech, Bush undid whatever effects Nader was going to have on this race: anyone on the left who was still contemplating a Nader protest vote must be having some serious second thoughts this week.

Fresh Air

I'll be on Fresh Air today talking about the new book for a wonderfully long stretch of time (wonderfully long from my perspective -- your mileage may vary.) It seems to be carried by just about every NPR station, generally in the afternoon --you can find your local station here. And at some point today, there will be a streaming version available here.

Boston area people: don't forget to stop by if you can tonight at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge at 6 PM. I've been working up some new material, so if you've sat through the entire Fresh Air, you won't be completely bored if you come out to the signing.

Paris Mismatch

It's funny how things come together sometimes. When my wife and I were living in the West Village, we lived near a wonderful intersection where Barrow and Commerce street connect. There's a bend in Commerce Street that's as far as I know one of the only places in Manhattan where a small street takes a 90-degree turn without intersecting with another street. All along the bend are lovely 19th-century houses, a few with gas lanterns in front. There's a small theater company right before the bend, and a classic Village restaurant The Grange Hall right past it.

Anyone who has spent any time in the Village will remember this spot immediately -- there's something magical about the way the street curves, something incredibly inviting and human-scale. Whenever I would take friends on a walking tour of the Village, I'd start or end at this very corner, and remark that it always looked like a little slice of Paris dropped down in the middle of Manhattan, or perhaps a movie-set version of Paris.

So there I am last night, sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco, watching the finale of Sex In The City. After shooting what seemed to me to be all the Paris sequences on location in France, there's a scene where Carrie leaves The Russian to go back and meet her new French friends at a restaurant somewhere -- and all of a sudden she's marching down Commerce Street, and walks into Grange Hall to find her friends long gone. (Perhaps they were in, um, France.) I chuckled at the screen, sitting alone in the hotel room: I guess I was right about the whole Paris-movie-set thing.

And then I sit down at the computer this morning, and learn via Kottke, that The Grange Hall is closing up shop, in fact will be gone for good by the time I return to the city this week. It had its last little burst of fame -- posing as a French restaurant, sure, but the audience share must have been pretty good. And then it closed its doors. Au revoir, mon ami!

Nader Redux

Those of you who have spent most of this morning fantasizing about kidnapping Ralph Nader and taking him to some kind of secure undisclosed location until December 2004 should read this thoughtful analysis from The Nation's John Nichols. It certainly made me a bit more comfortable with the idea of a Nader run -- though for about ten different reasons, I'd still prefer that he sit it out. The most interesting nugget for me was this:

Those in the Bush White House and its echo chambers on right-wing talk radio and the Fox television network, who have been delighting in the prospect of a Nader run, may not be laughing for long. Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama jurist whose fight to display the Ten Commandments on state property drew national attention last year, is being courted by the right-wing Constitution Party as a potential presidential candidate.

Mmmm. I like the sound of that.

PS. Eagled-eyed readers have pointed out that my talk at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge is at 6 PM, not later as the blog used to suggest. I promise to be on time, just as I will for my readings Monday at 12:30 at Stacy's in San Francisco, and Tuesday night at Keppler's in Menlo Park at 7:30.

This Is My Brain On Salon

Salon is featuring a three-part spread on Mind Wide Open this morning, including an excerpt from the chapter where I describe doing an fMRI on my own brain (a funny, and also somewhat terrifying, story.) There's also a wonderful review of the book by Andrew Leonard -- wonderful partially because it says some very nice things about the book, but also because it captures what a lot of people who've read the book have been telling me about lately, which is the weird, ultra-self-reflective mental state you find yourself in as you're reading the book. When I was writing it, I used to half-jokingly say to my editor that my primary objective with the book was to "mess with people's heads." From Leonard's review, and some of these other accounts, I'm hopeful that we may have pulled that part off at least. In a good way, of course.

I'm also taking part in a rolling conversation hosted by the Well as part of their public Inkwell writer's series. There's not really any point in readers of this blog going over there and asking questions about the book, since you've already got a forum here. But I didn't want y'all to think I was cheating on you by carrying on a conversation somewhere else and not mentioning it.

Sorry about the "y'all". I'm in North Carolina, remember.

Alex Rodriguez, Webmaster

As a Yankee fan I'm naturally delighted with the news that Alex Rodriguez is going to be joining our scrappy little team of billionaire all-stars. But I'm not entirely sure Rodriguez is being represented well by his comrades in the Player's Union. Consider this quote from today's Times:

The Yankees had to add value to the contract for the union to approve it, and they did so in two ways: They guaranteed Rodriguez a suite on the road, a perk the Yankees almost never allow, and gave Rodriguez permission to link his Web site to the Yankees' team site.

Okay, sure, a suite is nice. But what's up with the "permission to link"? I can imagine the negotiation now: "Alex, we are prepared to offer you a Magic Hyperlink, connecting your web site to ours using our patented Blue Words Technology. This linking technology is worth more than TEN MILLION DOLLARS, and you will be the only person online allowed to create this special link." (Sounds of audible gasps among the Player's Union reps in the room.)

If they were really trying to add value, they should have offered to host his blog. Or at least thrown in a free Typepad account.

Smart Robot Pet Tricks

A couple of items before I hit the road tomorrow morning for the main stretch of the book tour.

First, I've been meaning to link to this latest Emerging Tech column for Discover. It's a fun one about end-users creating new personalities for their AIBOs, and it ends with what I think is a pretty interesting question: what happens if robots turn out to be something closer to a medium than a virtual human -- something you create new forms of culture out of, instead of something that goes and fetches you a Scotch when you want it.

Secondly, I've updated the appearances schedule below, so if you live in Raleigh/Durham, Austin, Houston, the Bay Area, Boston, Washington, or New York, be sure to check the schedule and try to come out if you can. Particularly those of you in the Houston area. I know no one in Houston, and thus am filled with terror at the idea of doing a reading to a roomful of strangers. Or worse, an entirely empty room.

Finally, I'm going to be on ABC's national overnight news program, World News Now, talking about the book sometime between 1 and 5 AM. (I'm taping at 11.) So I'd appreciate if all of you would load up on the coffee at around midnight, and hunker down in front of the TV waiting all night for my five minutes of glory. No TiVoing allowed!

Updated 8:58 PM: Scratch what I said above -- I don't think the segment is going to air tonight, but I'll know more after the taping. So you all should try to get some sleep.

Your Brain: Discuss...

Tuesday was the officially publication date for Mind Wide Open, and since I've started to get messages from folks who have actually finished reading it, I thought I'd open up an official thread for the discussion of the book. (I put the URL for this site in the acknowledgments and in my bio, so we may well have some first-time visitors to the site coming here via the book, which is a nice thought.) Next week the real book tour begins, which paradoxically means I should have more time for posting here, given that I'll be holed up in hotel rooms with my laptop and no maniacal toddlers running around trying to learn how to type.

One of things that's always fascinating about this stage -- as the reviews and reader feedback start to come in -- is that there are always parts of the book where your tone and emphasis get interpreted in a very different way from what you expected. With Mind Wide Open, I think this may be happening with the last chapter, which tries to take a bigger picture look at what the latest brain science does to the general outlines of the Freudian model. When I was writing this chapter, I had in my head that I was going to irritate some of my readers who were still attached to Freud in one way or another, by suggesting that some of the Freudian model needed updating or revision. And so I made sure that there were a couple points where I talked about the ways in which Freud was still very relevant, and I gave a few shout-outs to the "neuro-psychoanalysis" movement, which includes some of my mentors in the brain sciences.

But now that the reviews are coming out, people seem to be reading that last chapter in exactly the opposite way: rather than being too harsh on Freud, it's seen as a defense of his theories. That was partly the angle of Washington Post review that ran this week; a number of the radio interviews I've done thus far worked under that assumption as well. I suppose people are so down on Freud they're surprised to find that he has any scientific relevance at all.

At any rate, I'd love to hear more thoughts, suggestions for further reading, angry rebuttals, and most of all, personal testimonials about how Mind Wide Open made you a better human being.