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A Love Song To Curbed

I'm still a huge fan of all the sites in the Nick Denton's nanopublishing empire, but I have to say the themed weblog that has resonated with my interests the most over the past year is a brand new one that comes from outside the Denton fold: Curbed, which is focused exclusively on urban planning and real estate in the New York area, and mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. So there's a mix of interesting new real estate listings (the old FEED office was just profiled in its incarnation a new upscale residential condo); links to news about various urban projects, like a new Chelsea pier or the Queens Olympic village; and entertaining city-themed blurbs grabbed from Craigslist or other blogs.

Curbed fills a hole that I've long wanted someone to fill. Gawker has always had a little of this real estate focus, but the dominant thread there is now gossip. The Metro section in the Times invariably has a couple stories that are the most interesting ones to me in the entire paper (usually about Ground Zero or the Ranter Brooklyn development) but everything else in Metro is skull-crushingly boring. Curbed has a nice edge to it, but mostly it just seems incredibly informative. Already, after just a week's worth of reading, I feel confident that if there's something interesting happening in terms of urban development in the city, I'll hear about it via Curbed.

I think that kind of micro-coverage is one of the great things that these thematically organized blogs provide. It used to be that you could feel confident that you were on top of major news -- or sports or financial stories -- if you read the Times on a daily basis, but your micro interests were harder to keep track of with the same regularity. I remember how hard it was to find out information about Apple before the web -- you'd have to wait for MacWorld and Macweek to come out, and even then they weren't always focused on my particular sub-interests. I knew I was missing information. But now take a micro category like Mac-based audio software: I feel completely confident that if anything happens in that category -- new upgrades, announcements, reviews -- I'll see it via one of the 2-3 blogs that I follow. Same goes for political polls and analysis thanks to DonkeyRising, and DC political chatter thanks to Wonkette, and now urban developments in NYC thanks to Curbed.

One suggestion I have for Curbed: there are already a bunch of tools out there on the various real estate sites for getting automatic notifications of new properties on the market in a specific category: Park Slope 2 Bedroom for less than 800K, etc. That's useful for people who are actively looking for a new space. But there are a lot of us who aren't actively looking, but like to follow the market and don't have time to sift through all the new listings, and don't need a hyper-specific filter. So I would love a feature that pointed me to the most interesting new Brooklyn townhouse on the market each day. I could imagine comparable features for downtown lofts, and uptown apartments/townhouses. If the categories were broad enough, it wouldn't take that much time for put together the collection for each day. Think of it as the Curbed version of Gawker's summaries of the gossip pages: we read the real estate section so you don't have to!

Exposé and Safari

Like many OS X users, I've grown completely dependent on the miniature-window navigation of Exposé; I suspect I still click the mouse more than I hit those Exposé function keys, but it's a remarkably close call. Now that I'm hooked, I'm finding myself wanting to Exposize other parts of the UI -- particularly my recent browsing history. Hitting f10 already lets me see all my open windows in Safari, but most of my surfing through the day happens in a single window, with one page replacing the next. I'm constantly pulling down the "history" menu item and scrolling through literally dozens of names to find a page I pulled up a few hours ago. The Exposé approach would be much easier: hit another key, and Safari instantly shows me all the pages I've visited in the past 24 hours, sized to fit on my screen. To make this more manageable, it would make sense to have an option to show only one page per domain name, since I'll often surf through a dozen pages from a single site that are visually indistinguishable from one another.

Knowing Apple's track record of delivering exactly what I've been looking for in new releases, they're probably about to announce this feature in Tiger next month. Can't wait.

PS. Note the number of links in the previous paragraph. A while I ago I begged the LazyWeb to come up with a URL posted tool that would let me quickly grab URLs from my recent history and past them as formatted HTML links into another application. I'm happy to say that I found exactly what I was looking for: the program URL Manager Pro, which seems to have a lot of other useful features as well.

Back To The Future

Reading this Reuters report on Bill Gates' public embrace of blogs as a business tool took me back down memory lane -- and into a few folders on my hard drive that I haven't visited for a while. Here's the first two paragraphs of the story:

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.

This brought a smile to my face, because it reminded me of a few months that I spent -- along with a few fellow soldiers -- trying to make the case for this use of weblogs, back in early 2001 when I was still doing FEED and Plastic at our wonderful, but short-lived company Automatic Media. I haven't talked about this period much, partially because it's a bit of a blur: we were running out of money at a steady clip, and I was writing Emergence at night. But it's fun now to look back on it, given what's happened since.

Basically, we'd launched Plastic.com in January 2001 based on a mod of the Slashdot tools, and confronted an utterly dead advertising market, thus cutting off the one initial revenue stream we'd been hoping for. But we'd grown convinced that the group and solo weblog format was an incredibly powerful one, and one that could be used for more than just pop culture riffing, as we were doing on Plastic. (One of our board members who had also seen the light turned out to be Uber-Blogger Jeff Jarvis, who was back then merely a lowly President of an entire division of the Newhouse publishing empire.) So we decided to try to transform the company into a, gulp, enterprise software company, where we would go around and do custom builds of weblog tools for firms to better manage their internal information flow. Of course, 99.9% of these businesses had no idea what a weblog was, and we only had about two months of cash left to make the transition. But it was a valiant effort, if ultimately a futile one.

I went back and found one of the documents from that period. Here's the language we'd put together:

Enterprise clients using the Plastic platform can:

• Allow employees to efficiently manage, navigate and enhance the collective knowledge base of the company

• Organize the company's collective intelligence using the platform's intuitive, customizable information-architecture options

• Allow employees to rate content (industry news, sales strategies, etc.) according to relevance, ratings that are available to all employees

• Empower employees with a set of communication tools that facilitate ongoing discussion of the company's stored knowledge

It's nice to think that we were on the right track back then, even if we were about three years too early. But I have to say, part of me is glad we didn't get a chance to prove the model. It would have taken two years of hand-to-mouth financing before the business environment got ready to understand what we were saying, and I'm honestly not sure if I was cut out to be an enterprise software salesman. Much more fun to be hanging out in Brooklyn with my kids and writing books all day.

The Greening Of My Thumb

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I am a gardener, but ever since we moved to our house in Brooklyn, I have technically been a person who owns a garden, who enjoys hanging out in his garden, and who has spent a little bit of money paying people to come plant things in said garden. But my dad and grandfather are/were ardent gardeners, and I can feel something of it awakening in me (assuming I can get over my bee phobia.) This spring I've ventured out to the back yard every day to inspect the latest developments: the hydrangea buds starting to appear, the wisteria blooms drooping, the ants doing their strange rituals on the peonies. This time of year, every day brings a small change to something in the garden; it's marvelous to watch these algorithms play themselves out with such regularity and precision.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I devoured this week's special issue on Landscape Architecture in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. If you missed it -- and have any interest in this stuff -- be sure to check it out online, though there are some wonderful pictures that might be better on the page. The two highlights for me were 1) a typically brilliant and intimate piece by Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, one of my all-time faves) on his experiences as a transplanted New England gardener trying to grow things in his new Berkeley garden, and 2) a new essay by Jane Jacobs -- as vital as ever, in her mid 80s I believe -- on "The Greening of the City".

A Theoretical Education

Because it's mentioned in the standard bio I use, I'm often asked about the fact that I majored in Semiotics during my undergraduate years at Brown. 10% of the time, the question comes with a knowing wink of affiliation, the implicit camaraderie of people who read too much Derrida in their early twenties. 10% of the time it's surprise that underscores the question: how did a nice science writer like yourself ever manage to spend your college years dismantling "truth-claims"? But most of the time, the question is: what the hell is semiotics?

Thankfully, I can now answer all of these questions by pointing to Paul Greenberg's excellent piece on the Brown Semiotics major and some of the program's graduates, running in today's Boston Globe. The subtitle is "How an obscure Brown concentration trained graduates to crack the codes of American culture -- and infiltrated the mainstream." It really captures what made the program interesting, and even does a good job explaining what we thought we were doing back then. I warn you, though, that for the second straight week there's a unintentionally comical quote from me:

But the thing that appealed most to students of semiotics was the idea that they had acquired a superhero-like power. "It was as if you had these, like, magic lenses that you could put on," recalls writer Steven Johnson...

Magic lenses! Like totally, dude.

From now on, I'm only doing interviews when I'm sober.

Thinking Faster

I've been meaning to point to a recent feature story I did for Discover that's an exploration of some of Antonio Damasio's latest ideas about the brain. It was a delightful piece to get to write, since I got to spend some quality time with Damasio without having to package our interactions all together into the traditional format of a profile. But I'm most energized by the premise of the piece, and the avenues I think it opens up for analysis. In Mind Wide Open I talked a little about the idea of connecting brain research with disciplines that exist one or two levels up, disciplines that study the way brain interact with other brains and with the forces of history: economics, sociology, media studies, even literary theory. But the book mostly leaves that idea as a kind of teaser. This Discover piece is my first attempt to systematically look at how that kind of interpretation might work. It revolves around the question of speed, both in terms of our inner neurological channels of communication, and the acceleration of modern life. I think there are some truly fresh ideas that will come out this kind of collaborative inquiry, though right now most of this is speculative. Here's a long excerpt since the piece is still locked down over at the Discover site:

On the face of it, idea that the speed of modern life will lead to cognitive overload is a familiar complaint: cultural critics like David Shenk and the late Neil Postman have warned of the dangers of accelerated society. But Damasio has a twist: he's not saying that the brain can't keep up with the society -- he's saying that part of the brain can't keep up with the society, while another part, thus far, has been game to go along for the ride.

"We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other, but that are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with time scales of a second or more. Than you have the cognitive system, which is much faster, because of the way it's wired, and because a lot of the fiber systems are totally myelinated -- which means it works much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names, in just a few hundredths of a second. And in fact it has been suggested that we're optimizing those times -- that we're working faster and faster. Certainly people that are younger are now capable of working at faster and faster rates." You need only watch a concert pianist's fingers -- or those of a teenager running fifteen simultaneous Instant Messenger chats -- to see how certain brain functions can, with adequate training, reach astonishing velocities.

But other brain functions may have fixed ceilings. "There is no evidence whatsoever that the emotional system is going to speed up," Damasio tells me. "In fact, I think that it's pretty clear that the emotional system, because it is a body regulatory system, is going to stay at those same slow time constants. There's this constant limit, which is that the fibers are unmyelinated. So the conduction is very slow." In a sense, this is an engineering problem: The system that builds somatic markers -- the system that encodes the stream of consciousness with value -- works more slowly than the system that feeds it data to encode. The result is not a short-circuit of our cognitive machinery. (We can in fact process all that data, and perhaps more.) The danger comes from the emotional system shorting out.

In Today's Times

It's been nearly four months since the book started appearing on the shelves, but for some odd reason, today is Mind Wide Open day at the New York Times. First there's this lovely review of the book, written by Jonathan Weiner, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of The Beak Of The Finch. He has some very nice things to say about the book, but also has a truly artful way of describing what I was trying to do:

Johnson's preoccupations, the weather systems of his own inner life, keep cycling back chapter after chapter: his horror when that window blew in and almost killed his wife; his moments of tenderness gazing at their sleeping newborn son. As he explores his inner world and the mental modules that help to shape it, we begin to feel that we are right in there with him -- and we have a new sense of what it means to be human.

Meanwhile, in the Week In Review section, Amy Harmon has a fascinating story on "neurodiversity" that includes a few paragraphs about my adventures writing Mind Wide Open. Compared to Jonathan Weiner's prose, however, my attempts at describing the objectives of the book are somewhat less than artful. You gotta love it when the Times quotes you saying: "Enough about the human race - I want to hear about me."

The Big One

There's an old John Stewart line from a few years ago, just as the argument for war in Iraq was starting to flare up. It goes something like this: "Everybody keeps talking about how Saddam has these weapons of mass destruction." Stewart gives a quizzical look and then asks, "As opposed to our weapons of love?"

I thought of that line watching the mostly unwatchable but still strangely hypnotic "10.5" miniseries earlier this week, in which a giant earthquake destroys most of Southern California, and topples a series of west coast landmarks along the way. What struck me watching it was that the movie had a central plot twist that has become bizarrely familiar over the past few years: when the rogue seismologist (played by Kim Delaney) realizes that the The Big One is truly upon us, she hatches a scheme to keep the entire Pacific coast from sliding into the ocean: setting off five underground nuclear explosions at crucial points in the fault line, thereby "fusing" the fault together with the tremendous heat of the explosions.

Now, I know there are the obvious objections that 1) this probably wouldn't work in real life, and 2) this is the exact inverse of the plot of Superman 1 -- detonating a nuclear warhead in the San Andreas to keep California from sliding into the sea, instead of making it slide into the sea, as Lex Luthor planned to do. But I think the more important point here is that this is now the fourth big disaster movie in recent years (Deep Impact, The Core, Armageddon) that involves saving the planet through the unlikely means of detonating nuclear weapons. I don't think it's pushing things too far into the realm of ideological critique to say that this is a slightly skewed representation of what nuclear weapons are designed to do. If you knew nothing of the daily headlines or military history, and were simply a viewer of popular entertainment, you might think that the only reason we kept our nukes around was to protect us from some future environmental catastrophe.

Come to think of it, perhaps this explains why we're spending $30 billion over the next four years "modernizing" our nuclear arsenal.

The Correct Procedure For Trashing My Book

Ever since Mind Wide Open's release in the States three months ago, when I began bombarding you with posts about my sales breakthroughs and glamorous media appearances, I've been planning on posting links to critical reviews to keep the blog from seeming too full of itself. For a while it looked like we were going to dodge that particular bullet, but fortunately the UK edition came along and generated the kind of review that causes some writers to lock themselves up in a closet for a month. It ran in The New Statesman last week, and it literally ends with the command: "Do not read this book."

Plug that quote on the top of the paperback cover and we're ready to go! Abbie Hoffman would be proud.

It turns out to be one of those reviews that appears to be written about some other book, where the reviewer has either willfully ignored or failed to understand the book's underlying argument. He spends most of the review critiquing the ambitions of consciousness studies and evolutionary psychology, despite the fact that I began the book by saying that it would have nothing to say about the question of consciousness, and that its general argument was significantly different from the evolutionary psychology approach (though not necessarily incompatible with it.) The question of brain science as a lens for personal self-awareness -- understanding the details of your own life, and not just how the brain evolved, or how the magic of conciousness happens -- doesn't really appear in the review, though it is the essential subject, not to mention the subtitle, of Mind Wide Open.

At one point, he refers to me "padding" the book with "autobiographical ramblings." There was another reference to prominence of "personal anecdotes" in a semi-critical reader review on Amazon, so allow me a few sentences to make something clear. If you'd like to write a critical review of Mind Wide Open, by all means go ahead, but it's not sufficient to throw out the allegation that the book contains autobiographical material and have that stand as a criticism on its own. It's like critiquing a physics textbook for having equations, or a novel for only containing made-up people. The book was designed to be a personal journey into brain science, an attempt to see if neuroscience's insights would change the way I thought about myself. So personal anecdotes are central to the argument, not some kind of padding. The way to criticize the book is to actually discuss the many insights that I describe: mindreading, oxytocin and stress, the different attention tools, the amygdala and my fear memories, mood congruity, and so on. (The New Statesman review doesn't mention any of these, of course.) You can say that these insights are 1) not accurate because I've got the science wrong, 2) too subjective to be empirically useful, 3) not really insights because they are commonplace ideas that you don't need brain science to illuminate. Any of those would serve as a valid critique, though of course I'd probably be inclined to argue with your interpretation. But simply denouncing the idea of a personal anecdote just makes it sound like you don't understand what the book is trying to do.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening.

Updated 5/2, 8:42 PM: Paul Myers comes through with a brilliant dissection of the bizarre logic in the New Statesman review.